Life in Technicolor
by ncfan
Summary: Random snapshots of life in the world of Naruto. From lighthearted to depressing to just plain weird... Formerly known as Stories Untold
1. 1 to 20

There may be more chapters in the future, but each chapter of moments is complete.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

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**1**

Tenten's first kiss was not Hyuuga Neji. Her first kiss was in fact Uzumaki Naruto.

It happened when they were ANBU rookies. Tenten and Naruto had been sent on their first mission alone together; it was coincidentally Tenten's first seduction mission.

Tenten knew that the mission was likely to get unpleasant, and asked Naruto to do a favor for her. He was oddly sympathetic; Naruto viewed Tenten as being more like an older sister than anything else, but he figured it wouldn't be too bad, and Tenten told him that she would rather that a boy close to her own age be her first kiss rather than a middle-aged fat man stinking of sake and decay.

It was, to both of them, surprisingly pleasant. Naruto pretended it was Sakura while knowing that Neji would kill him if he could see this, and Tenten mirrored Naruto's thoughts, pretending it was Neji and knowing that Lee would kill him if he saw this.

They had the agreement that they would never speak of it around other people again; they would occasionally laugh about it at Naruto's apartment over takeout while watching movies.

And for the record, no, they did _not_ have sex; the mission called for a virgin.

When Naruto later waggled his eyebrows and jokingly said "_Maybe we should have done _that_ too_," Tenten tried not to slug him too hard.

**2**

A year after the close of the First Great Shinobi World War, an albinistic, white-haired, blue-eyed girl named Hayashi Hisano was born in a snow-covered village in the north of the Earth Country.

When she was two years old, Kumo nin attacked her little village. Hisano's first memories were a vivid recollection of the blood of her mother and older sisters hitting the snow as they died, and of a Kumo nin using her for kunai practice, deliberately missing her in order to terrorize the toddler. All of the kunai missed her except for one that grazed her face, leaving a small crescent-shaped scar above Hisano's right eye for the rest of her life.

When Iwa nin came and found the village, they found only one survivor, a half-catatonic toddler nursing a rabid hatred of Kumo nin.

As she grew, though Hisano was only recognized in the Academy as having one hundred percent accuracy and being otherwise average, she was actually the most intelligent student in her year; she didn't test well.

Hisano became a genin at ten, made chunin at twelve, and hit jonin at sixteen. She was a combatant for the entirety of the ten-year-long Second War, and eventually became an ANBU Hunter nin. She made a living terrorizing Kumo nin out of their wits. She cut a swath through the Kumogakure ranks, and was forever after known as the "Reaper" of Iwagakure.

She bore a child to a man from a dispossessed clan, who died before the baby was born. All the child inherited from his father was his facial structure, and the color and shape of his eyes.

Hisano was killed during the Battle of Kikyo Pass, in the first year of the Third War. Her infant son was found by a Leaf medic.

Her son's birth name was Hayashi Yukito.

His legal name was Yakushi Kabuto.

**3**

Senju Hashirama and Senju Tobirama were not related in any way, shape or form.

When Hashirama, an orphan roaming the countryside of the Land of Fire, was fourteen, he ran into a small albinistic boy named Tobirama who could manipulate water, just as Hashirama could manipulate plant life. Hashirama took the boy under his wing, looking out for him, and young Tobirama soon adopted the name of Senju.

No one ever knew that Hashirama and Tobirama weren't related; it was only a matter of coincidence that their names had identical suffixes and that their facial features bore a small amount of resemblance to each other.

**4**

Gaara rued the night he discovered how low his tolerance for alcohol was.

Naruto, Kiba and Shikamaru approached him while he was visiting Konoha, talking about introducing him to the joys of sake. Gaara, like a fool, agreed.

When they got to the bar that night, Naruto handed Gaara a shot glass of sake. Gaara drank it.

And promptly passed out.

Gaara woke up several hours later on Naruto's couch with a splitting headache, Kankuro on one side of him, splashing cold water in his face and looking concerned, Tsunade on the other side of him, snickering under her breath.

The entirety of the Rookie Nine and Team Gai was crowded in the apartment, and Temari was trying her very best to throttle Naruto while screaming at him about getting her baby brother drunk.

**5**

For exactly six months, Naruto was convinced that he was in love with Temari.

It started when Temari was beating him up for the "Gaara-got-drunk" incident. Soon after that, he was following her everywhere.

Naruto became Temari's unofficial shadow. She was a bit bemused by this; Kankuro was amused. Hinata was devastated, and Sakura and Shikamaru were both jealous without really knowing why. Everyone else just gossiped behind their hands.

Gaara, however, had to take exception to this. Exactly six months to the day after he began following her, Gaara took Naruto aside and told him that while he counted Naruto as his closest friend, his status as Temari's baby brother made him obliged to kill him if it went any further.

Naruto began to seriously re-evaluate his feelings towards the blonde kunoichi from the Sand after that.

**6**

Nearly nine months after an invasion of Konoha by enemy nin, Shizune went into labor with her first and only child.

She had never shown much, and Tsunade hadn't been aware of it, but Ino and Sakura were; they had snuck into her apartment after seeing her talking with the man in question during the battle because they had known that the man had been among those dead.

Ino and Sakura sat on either side of her during the delivery, Ino holding "Shizune-sensei's" hand while Sakura dabbed her forehead with a wet rag. Tsunade delivered the child.

When Shizune was done giving birth, Tsunade asked her who the father was so she could track him down and kill him. Shizune only answered dully that he had been killed during the invasion.

Tsunade accepted this without question; that broad statement included half the ranks. Sakura and Ino exchanged knowing looks; what they knew that Tsunade didn't was that the man had been killed on the _wrong_ side of the battle.

The child was a boy with coal-black hair and hyacinthine blue eyes that faded to an equally dense black within minutes. He lived for only six hours.

At Tsunade's insistence, he was buried on the Senju family burial ground. He was never given a name.

**7**

If Sasori had never defected from Sunagakure, he and Jiraiya would have eventually become close friends.

They bonded over talks about their jinchūriki godsons as they tried to protect Naruto and Gaara respectively from the ridicule and persecution of their villages.

During one of their very long conversations, Sasori mentioned that he had been losing his sanity day by day since taking Gaara on as his charge. Jiraiya could sympathize.

**8**

Yuuhi Kurenai, a Sunagakure native and a victim of a Leaf attack on the Sand during the Second War, met Sarutobi Asuma when she was seven, while recovering from being poisoned by nerve gas in a Konohagakure hospital.

Asuma had been visiting an injured relative, and had noticed Kurenai all alone in her room, no visitors or anything, staring numbly out the window.

He went in, introduced himself, and asked her what she was doing in the hospital.

Kurenai told him to go to hell.

Asuma was stunned. It was the first time his boyish, slightly arrogant charm _hadn't_ worked on a girl. Sarutobi Hiruzen, who had been watching the exchange, took Asuma aside and explained Kurenai's circumstances in the hope that his son would leave the poor girl alone.

Asuma did _not_ leave Kurenai alone.

The next time he came, he brought a vase of rosemary with him. Kurenai promptly started bawling. Her mother had kept rosemary in their house.

They became friends the day Asuma brought his brother and a board game with him.

**9**

When Temari was sixteen, she caught wind of a plot by the council to have Chiyo forcibly extract the Shukaku from Gaara, an action that would have killed him.

Temari took instant action. She threatened all of them separately with scandal, disgrace, financial ruin and ultimately violent death if they ever so much as thought of pursuing that course of action again. To this day, the council struggle not to pee their pants in fear every time Temari comes near them.

Hell hath no fury like a big sister who's had her baby brother threatened. Women who've been scorned be damned.

**10**

The only reason Shizune stuck with Tsunade for as long as she did was because of two separate incidents when Tsunade took her back to Konoha to attend the genin exams shortly after the Kyuubi's attack.

Jiraiya and the Sandaime both, on separate occasions, took her aside and told her that they needed her to protect Tsunade from herself. Shizune took it seriously.

**11**

Jiraiya was in the north a week before the Kyuubi's attack on Konoha, and saw the fox on a rampage that he was sure was leading towards Konoha. He was too far away to get there in time, but he happened to know that Tsunade wasn't.

He had a messenger toad take a message to Tsunade and Minato separately, informing them of the Kyuubi's progress south; he begged Tsunade to come to Konoha's aid.

She didn't.

Tsunade arrived a week after the Kyuubi's attack. Jiraiya was there waiting for her. Jiraiya was terrible in his grief, and he needed someone to blame; his eyes lit on Tsunade.

The ensuing confrontation included the only time Jiraiya ever swore at Tsunade (His exact words, among others, were "selfish bitch"). Jiraiya cursed and raged and wept; Tsunade was stone silent.

Finally, Jiraiya asked Tsunade if she really hated Konoha that much.

To his horror, she said nothing, and Jiraiya found himself wondering how he had ever loved this woman.

**12**

When Itachi learned of Sasuke's battle at the Valley of the End and that he had beaten a jinchūriki almost to the point of death, he was practically giddy that Sasuke's skills had progressed so far, until he learned who his opponent had been and who he'd been to him, and then the tears began to roll in earnest.

Because Itachi had the first inkling that maybe he had created a monster.

**13**

Anko and Shizune had a strange sort of camaraderie that no one really understood or wanted to.

They started meeting up in bars soon after Tsunade came back to the village; most agree that it was pure accident the first time. They exchanged a few gloomy words, each other's recommendations on drinks, and agreed to meet "this time next week".

At their weekly meetings, they didn't talk much, and they barely ever made eye contact, but they seemed to enjoy each other's company.

The basis of their relationship: they were both trained by a sannin, and said sensei was having an adverse effect on their sanity.

**14**

In Iwagakure, members of the ANBU Black Op.s who don't belong to clans are branded with a curse mark upon their admission.

The curse mark is not meant to augment any abilities; instead, it is meant to be used to control the members of the ANBU. The head of the ANBU can activate it if a member is disobedient, and the mark causes intense pain and high fever (often termed "The ANBU Illness") when intentionally or unintentionally activated.

It also alters the genetic code of the wearer. These mutations are never apparent in the wearers themselves, but it does become noticeable in the wearer's children.

One out of fifteen children born to an Iwagakure ANBU is born perfectly normal. The other fourteen are born with an unstable genetic code causing wild mutations or defects that invariably guarantee that they won't live to see middle age. Kabuto was one of the lucky one out of fifteen born normal; Deidara was not.

If Sasuke hadn't killed Deidara, his body probably would have broken down to the point of death by the time he was thirty-five.

**15**

Kakashi was Yugao's first senpai when she joined the ANBU. Sometimes, late at night on lonely vigils, he would tell her tales of Obito.

**16**

When Uchiha Mikoto was ten, her mother gave birth to another girl. This girl was subjected to a blood test as all Uchiha were to gauge the potential strength of her Sharingan. That was when the girl's "difference" was first noticed.

The infant girl lacked the genes necessary to use or carry the Sharingan. It was not that she lacked the ability to unlock her bloodline; it was that she didn't have it.

The immediate suspicion was that Mikoto's mother, an Uchiha by birth, had cuckolded her husband, who was the current Uchiha clan head. A genetic test soon disproved that allegation, but the little girl was treated as a shameful secret her whole life. She was not allowed to leave the clan grounds, and was not allowed to be a shinobi.

When the girl was fifteen, a bridge builder from the Wave Country came to the Uchiha clan head, and ended up taking the girl back with him to his home.

The girl's name was Uchiha Tsunami. She soon became just plain Tsunami.

**17**

The Iron Sand kekkei genkai of the Sandaime Kazekage was once not the only bloodline the Land of Wind possessed. Once, it had more bloodlines than any other country, even the Lands of Fire and Water.

The Land of Fire didn't like that, so they systematically slaughtered all of Suna's bloodline clans over the course of a year, during peacetime.

**18**

The Yamanaka clan's Shintensin no Jutsu and all of its derivatives had a secret history.

Once, centuries ago, the Yamanaka clan was host to spiritual parasites. These parasites very slowly fed off of the Yamanaka clan's spirits in exchange for giving them the ability to slip their own soul into the bodies of others in order to give the parasites multiple sources of food.

Even after the parasites were exorcised from the clans' bodies, they retained their abilities to slip their souls into the bodies of others.

**19**

When a mission to deliver a message to an empire to the west came up, Tenten sprung to the opportunity, and convinced the whole of the confused Team Gai to come too.

As they went further west, Tenten seemed to be getting more and more giddy, and Team Gai had no idea why. They were also shocked when the nobleman meeting them seemed to know who Tenten was and called her "my dear niece".

Tenten, little no-family-name Tenten, in fact had a far more prestigious background than anyone in Konohagakure. Her grandfather had been a noble landowner in the empire who had been forced to fled during war. His son, Tenten's maternal uncle, eventually returned and reclaimed his father's title. Since her uncle had no children, she was his heiress presumptive.

When Tenten's uncle died, she would receive a letter requesting that she return to take up her uncle's title. Team Gai found themselves dreading the day that letter would come.

**20**

What is known about Shisui's final days was that he was ordered to spy on his paternal cousin and close friend Itachi by the elders of the Uchiha clan. What _isn't_ known is that councilmen Danzo, Homura and Koharu informed Shisui about Itachi's mission and ordered him not to report back anything about Itachi's behavior to the clan.

Shisui was on Itachi's side, to the end.

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13: Anko and Shizune's relationship is modeled off of Vir and Lennier's on _Babylon 5_.


	2. 21 to 40

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

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**21**

Without ever really knowing that they were working towards the same goal, Orochimaru and Tsunade took it upon themselves to brutally murder Jiraiya's dream of being Hokage.

Orochimaru cheered Jiraiya on while doing everything within his power to make sure that Jiraiya would fail, because _he_ was going to be Yondaime, and he would cut down anyone who got in his way. That was why Orochimaru was never worthy to become Hokage; at first he only wanted the position to spite Jiraiya, and later he wanted it to increase his own power.

Tsunade took a more direct approach. She cruelly told him again and again, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she thought of his chances and his dreams. _"You can't", "You haven't got the nerve", "Only heroes become Hokage", "You'll never be good enough, no matter how hard you try"…_

When Jiraiya heard how brutal Naruto and Neji's fight got during the Chunin Exams and what had been said between them, he didn't blame Naruto for wanting to rip Neji's face off. He'd wanted to do worse to Tsunade.

Ultimately, it was Tsunade's vindictive taunts rather than Orochimaru's ruthless scheming that killed Jiraiya's dream.

Three days after Minato's death, Sarutobi tracked Jiraiya down to a bar and asked him to become Godaime. Jiraiya threw the contents of his sake glass in his old sensei's face and left without paying, laughing bitterly as he went.

**22**

When Shimura Danzo was a young man he had an affair with a woman from a minor clan. They continued on for years, never marrying, and parted on friendly terms.

The woman discovered that she was pregnant, and thanks to the traditions of his clan Danzo could neither acknowledge the child as his own nor having anything to do with him. He didn't bother tracking his son's progress.

The child of that union went on to marry one of his cousins and have two children, one who died in one of the Wars and one who survived to adulthood.

Danzo is unaware that his surviving grandchild works for one of his political enemies; in fact, he's unaware that he ever had grandchildren to begin with.

If they ever became aware of their familial ties Danzo would find himself proud and disgusted at the same time, and the grandchild in question would just be highly disappointed.

**23**

Anko and Asuma hate each other with a passion so fervent as to be considered unholy.

No one was ever quite sure why; Anko and Asuma probably couldn't have explained it if they had been asked. All anyone knew was that when they met, things got broken.

The last incident involved the wholesale destruction of Choji's favorite barbecue restaurant (he still hasn't forgiven Anko for setting it on fire) and the breaking of the proprietor's ribcage.

Anko and clan Sarutobi were made to shoulder the financial reparations equally.

**24**

If Jiraiya had killed Orochimaru while pursuing him, the lives of those who he gathered under him would have been very different.

Jirobo became the Raikage's primary enforcer after Kirabi and Nii Yugito; he was eventually killed by Hatake Kakashi, who got him with a Chidori through the heart, after their battle blasted most of the surrounding landscape and left the soil infertile for the next ten years. Kirabi and Yugito did _not_ miss him.

Kidomaru was still the freak of the Grass Country, but this time around he got paid for it. He was the leader of Kusagakure's favorite spy, and was paid extremely well for being so.

Juugo still would have locked himself in a cave, and _no one_ would have found him.

Dosu would have stayed a shinobi of the Mist, and would become one of the ones most outspoken against the Yondaime Mizukage's halting of the purges.

Tayuya would have stayed in her little village in the Earth Country until the utter monotony of it was too much to take. She struck out to Iwa at eleven, and was the first child of her age to be accepted into the Iwa Academy. She became a genjutsu specialist and bodyguard to the Sandaime Tsuchikage.

Sakon and Ukon would never have left Ame, and would have eventually become the Rain's premier assassins. That didn't stop Tayuya from killing them when they tried to assassinate the Tsuchikage. She waited until she got bored with their antics, caught them in a genjutsu and stabbed them in their collective guts.

Zaku would have been killed in a street brawl with a gang of older boys when he was ten.

Kin would have still been a farmer's daughter, and would have been dead at thirteen, raped and killed by an invading Iwa nin.

Karin would have eventually wandered to Amegakure, where a medic saw fit to teach her proper medical ninjutsu so she wouldn't have to open herself up to the risk of potentially fatal bacterial infection every time she wanted to heal someone. She would become to Ame what Tsunade was to the Leaf.

After Sasori no longer had need of a spy in the Leaf, he released the genjutsu on Kabuto permanently, the latter never becoming aware of what had happened to him; if he had any memory lapses, they were few and Kabuto always attributed them to poor sleeping habits. Since there was never any need to hide his abilities, his track record of promotions mirrored that of his birth mother: genin at ten, chunin at twelve, jonin at sixteen. Kabuto still like to mess with people's heads, but only on the battlefield.

Kimimaro was picked up by Zabuza and Haku the night the Kaguya clan was massacred, and together the three of them raised mayhem and unholy hell in the Water Country and the nations in the close vicinity. Thanks to the fact that Zabuza did not require Kimimaro to overexert himself on a daily basis and there was no curse marks putting an added strain on his body, Kimimaro survived to the age of twenty-five, ten years longer than he would have, when he was poisoned by a Sunagakure puppeteer.

As a Mist genin, Suigetsu pulled a Zabuza and attempted to assassinate the Yondaime Mizukage. The attempt failed, but instead of killing him, the Yondaime laughed, called Suigetsu a fool but a brave fool, and granted him chunin status on the spot. Suigetsu was confused, and oddly pleased.

**25**

The Sanbi was extracted from Yagura because he had ordered it, finally realizing exactly what his old-time nemesis Uchiha Madara had been doing to him for many years, sapping him of his free will and making him a puppet to Madara's designs.

When his adopted daughter, Terumi Mei demanded to know why he was doing this, Yagura told her, "You will be Mizukage tomorrow". He also said that he wanted to die with some measure of dignity before Madara took _that_ away from him too.

**26**

In Iwagakure, genin are required to train barefoot. The ground they train on is covered in sharp stone and broken glass. A running joke around Iwa is that within a year of training, genin would outgrow their shoes thanks to the thickness of the calluses and scars on their feet.

**27**

As a rule, kages who die in office tend to meet spectacularly violent and meaningful ends. The Yondaime Hokage died defending his village from the Kyuubi, the Godaime Kazekage was killed protecting Suna from the Akatsuki, the Sandaime Hokage died disabling Orochimaru and the Sandaime Raikage went out in a ball of lightning that engulfed fully two platoons of Leaf shinobi.

Despite this, the Shodai Hokage, the one most likely to have a meaningful death, died in a training accident that could have been prevented had his brother had better aim.

**28**

In a world where Gaara was not revived, when Tsunade heard of his death, she thought of another man, another good man who was painfully young to assume the mantle of kage, who could have changed the world if given the chance, but who, like Gaara, ultimately died for a village that didn't deserve him.

In that moment, Tsunade realized just how much she hated the hat she was required to claim.

**29**

When he was twenty-two, Raidou came back from a mission badly injured. Genma, Izumo and Kotetsu went to see him in the hospital the day the wrappings on his face were removed.

When they saw him, Izumo and Kotetsu started calling him "Scar Face Raidou", trying to lighten the mood. The moment Raidou realized why they were calling him that, he shot a murderous, "I'm going to kill them if you don't get them out of here" sort of look at Genma. Genma promptly dragged both of the younger men out of the room by the backs of their shirts.

**30**

There is a tradition in Konohagakure of pranking shinobi upon their admission into the ANBU. The jokes tend to be in bad taste.

Kakashi woke up one morning to find pictures of himself with his mask off pasted on the walls of his bedroom.

Tenzo walked into his kitchen one morning and found a live snake coiled on his kitchen table.

Uzuki Yugao found a katana made of rubber in place of her real one during a mission.

Naruto was told that Sakura had finally accepted his invitation for a date, and waited at Ichiraku Ramen for two hours, for someone who was never going to come.

Tenten discovered that all her sealing scrolls had been replaced by curling irons.

No one's quite sure what was done to Itachi. His father reported that Itachi slept with a kunai tightly clenched in his hand for three weeks afterwards.

**31**

Deidara was a suicidal lunatic. Nothing more need be said.

**32**

Shizune was reminded irresistibly of Tsunade's tales of her younger brother Nawaki when she first laid eyes on Naruto. He was bursting with energy and enthusiasm, and was probably just as danger-prone as Senju Nawaki had been.

Shizune quickly established herself as an overprotective big sister figure for the boy; it wasn't hard to feel fond of him, as Naruto was infectiously endearing. It was amazing how receptive he was to even the smallest kindnesses, and being called "Shizune-neechan" day in and day out wasn't that bad.

As Shizune scrambled to try and keep Tsunade from sending Naruto on missions against the Akatsuki (he was a jinchūriki for crying out loud; he'd have to have a death wish if he wanted to fight them) and tried to keep Sakura from killing Naruto on a daily basis, Shizune came to the realization that out of the three main women in Naruto's life, she was probably the only one who gave a damn about his physical well-being.

That disturbed her immensely.

**33**

Orochimaru and Jiraiya's first (and only) babysitting job came when they were eighteen. It was watching Tsunade's three-year-old brother, Senju Nawaki.

Tsunade herself was mysteriously absent; that should have tipped Jiraiya and Orochimaru off. It didn't, however, and they went in completely unaware of what they were walking into.

To this day, neither one of them could have explained how a toddler got the drop on them. They just knew that they were chasing Nawaki all over the village from dawn to dusk, when the boy finally got hungry and the three stopped for akashiyaki, which was apparently what Nawaki most liked to eat.

Both Jiraiya and Orochimaru were mortified that a toddler had managed to elude them, and when Tsunade returned to the clan grounds at nightfall and found both of them exhausted, she remarked, "And _this_ is why I went AWOL today."

Orochimaru refused to have anything to do with Nawaki until nine years later, when he (reluctantly) agreed to become his sensei. It would be good revenge, he decided.

Jiraiya, on the other hand, took an active role in Nawaki's upbringing and chased him around the village many _more_ times.

**34**

Kirabi only once ever saw Nii Yugito cry.

She was ten, and after a long day of training they were heading back to the apartment that at the time they had shared. Kirabi went to the kitchen to cook, and for about fifteen minutes, everything seemed normal.

Then, Kirabi heard soft sobbing from the next room.

Someone, it seemed, had gone to the trouble of poisoning Yugito's cat. Kirabi did NOT like that.

Since Kirabi somehow knew exactly who was to blame, he set off to corner the poisoner. Said poisoner was beaten to an inch of his life for making "Yugito-imouto" cry. Kirabi quite frankly didn't care if he got ratted out.

When she heard what had happened, Kirabi also marked it as the only time Yugito ever hugged him. Of course, if he ever told anyone about it, he could mark down the experience as the only time Yugito ever _killed_ him too.

**35**

While Team Gai were in Tenten's ancestral home, a coup erupted in the capital city. Apparently, some of the rebels supposedly put down decades beforehand weren't quite as put down as it had been thought.

Naruto and Shino were sent as back-up, seeing as both were well-suited for wide scale fighting; they bickered the whole time they traveled there.

In the fighting (Team Gai plus Naruto and Shino were recruited to protect the emperor and put down the rebels _again_) Lee and Gai maxed out opening the Gates and Neji's Jyuuken strikes somehow backfired on him; all three were incapacitated.

Thus began the only time Naruto, Shino and Tenten ever worked together.

They were camped outside the village, and one night they came up with the single most brilliant and utterly _insane_ strategy ever devised by shinobi. Nothing of its kind has been thought of since.

The next morning, their plan was put into action.

Roughly seventy five to one hundred Kage Bunshin were dispatched onto the walls, getting rid of rebel sentries as they went. For every Bunshin that went down, two more were created, and the rebels started to get extremely nervous when the arrows that they fired into the real Naruto's body started popping out.

Meanwhile, this created an opening for Tenten to sneak into the gatehouse and knock out the gatekeeper; considering he was supporting the rebels against his will, Tenten didn't hit the elderly man too hard. She got the south gate opened, and this was where Shino came in.

The rebels took one look at Shino's kikai and got the wrong idea. In five seconds, they became convinced that the hordes of insects descending upon them (for Shino had more kikai than anyone had ever suspected) was in fact "the hand of God descending upon them". They were further convinced that it was a holy plague when they saw that no one who had not sided with the rebels were having their eyes eaten out of their sockets.

Naruto's Kage Bunshin continued to fight like hordes of madmen; they eventually moved into the city and covered the men the kikai missed.

Throughout this, Tenten handled the rebels surrounding the palace and proved just why you don't mess with kunoichi. A hail of kunai, shuriken and other projectile weapons erupted on the rebels, every bit as deadly as Shino's kikai and Naruto's Bunshin. All the while, she was moving through her own hail storm of live steel, killing men close up. She emerged without a scratch on her.

When the fighting was over, Naruto, Shino and Tenten moved up the center of the city, the villagers cheering them on hoarsely; Shino and Tenten had to support an utterly exhausted but utterly exuberant Naruto.

When the emperor took a good look at them, and the property damage outside, he took a long, hard look at the formerly deposed little noble girl, the insect-wielding boy and the supposedly inexhaustible boy, he stopped for a moment. He didn't scold, or even frown. He burst out laughing.

As a favor to the Leaf, the emperor did not demand restitution for the widespread property damage, but Tsunade decided it was best not to group the three together ever again.

What was more disturbing, however, was how they were treating each other when they got home.

Naruto and Shino were suddenly the best of friends, Tenten found Shino considerably less creepy than she had before, Shino suddenly acquired a greater respect for weapons specialists and kunoichi in general, and Naruto and Tenten wanted to train together all the time.

For years afterwards, everyone who was anybody would be wondering: What the hell happened between them, exactly?

**36**

Asuma and Kurenai didn't always have a lovey-dovey, perfectly happy relationship. They had their spats, their break-ups and their reunions. One, however, had consequences that neither of them had anticipated.

Asuma and Kurenai had one of their arguments; it doesn't matter about what. Kurenai stormed off angrily, and Asuma headed off to a bar, and got slightly drunk.

While at the bar, Asuma had the half-baked idea that he'd flirt with a few women to get back at his girlfriend. Unfortunately for him, those two women happened to be Anko and Shizune, who were there for their weekly drink and talk. Anko slugged him in the jaw; Shizune dropped all pretense of politeness and threw the contents of her glass in his face.

After that, they immediately went to Kurenai's house, with the request of _"Control your boyfriend"_. The three of them had a meaningful talk about men in general and Asuma in particular, and the Coalition Against Cheating Boyfriends was formed.

Tomorrow morning, while Asuma and his team were eating at a barbecue restaurant, Kurenai, Shizune and Anko approached him, smiled sweetly, and just as sweetly told him that if he ever did that again, they were going to take turns killing him.

Choji was flat-out confused; Shikamaru rolled his eyes and muttered _"women"_ to which Ino hit him on top of the head; Ino exchanged a slightly triumphant look with her medical trainer before the three older kunoichi walked out. Asuma just let the cigarette fall from his lips; it had apparently never occurred to him that the women could join forces.

The CACB (Coalition Against Cheating Boyfriends) still exists; it has since expanded to include a few more members.

**37**

Tayuya and Kidomaru fairly regularly tried to poison each other during their time as Orochimaru's bodyguards. But somehow, it was always Jirobo who ended up eating or drinking everything they poisoned.

**38**

When Nii Yugito and Morino Ibiki crossed paths for the first (and only time), anyone who knew one or knew them both by reputation might have expected the world to implode.

The Raikage sent Yugito to Konoha to transport sensitive document to the Hokage. Ibiki, having heard of her stone-cold reputation, decided to try and have a crack at her; Yugito, having heard of Ibiki's less than savory reputation, decided she was going to freak him out.

Ibiki tracked her down to a small open-air restaurant where Yugito was just about done eating; she had renewed an old acquaintance with Kakashi, who waved at Ibiki as he left.

Ibiki sat down at the table with her and unceremoniously started to tear into Yugito.

Yugito, for her part, abruptly cut into his mind-meddling at about the thirtieth word. She looked him dead in the eye, allowing her pupils to dilate until they had nearly disappeared, and murmured, "I've heard of you, and what on earth makes you think you scare me, _little man_?" before leaving.

Ibiki's mouth open and shut without anything coming out for several seconds. He didn't regain the ability to speak until fifteen minutes later.

**39**

Minato had always figured that death would be some great adventure. He had grown up on the belief that death was only the beginning, and because of that he'd never bothered to feel any fear of what would happen to him after he died.

Death, was in fact, _not_ a great adventure. After spending a couple of days being chewed and digested by the Shinigami, the death god suddenly decided that the Kyuubi's chakra was giving him indigestion, and spat them both back out. After that, Minato got taken to the real afterlife.

The afterlife was, for him anyway, an endless series of hallways with rooms branching off. The rooms had no windows, and the halls never seemed to end.

Minato discovered just how miserable death could be when all of your loved ones were either on the other side or not on speaking terms with you.

**40**

In a world where betrayal cut even deeper and the mission to retrieve Sasuke took a darker turn, no one attended Sasuke's funeral.

They were too busy attending Naruto's.


	3. 41 to 60

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

* * *

**41**

Among the Kaguya clan, there was a tradition that following the death of one who possessed the kekkei genkai of that clan, their bones would be scavenged for suitable materials to make weapons with.

After Kimimaro died, his body was stripped of flesh and when Kabuto and the assorted Sound medical ninja were done with the Kaguya's skeleton there wasn't enough left of it to fit in a matchbox.

**42**

In the early days of the Shinobi civilizations, long before the founding of Konoha and in the days of the war between the Uchiha clan and Senju Hashirama's forces, a man from Lightning Country joined with Hashirama.

The man was named Akito. He had silver hair despite his young age, dark eyes, and he was without a doubt one of the most masterful Lightning manipulators who ever lived.

Akito was immensely loyal to the younger Hashirama, and Hashirama might not have been able to have achieve victory over the Uchiha without him.

Akito married a girl he had met in battle, and lived long enough to see his great-grandson be born over fifty years after the founding of Konohagakure.

The boy's name was Kakashi.

**43**

No one was very much surprised when Hyuuga Hiashi was assassinated. The man who had killed him had had as a lover a member of the Branch Family who had recently died due to complications with her Cursed Seal.

Hiashi took a kunai to the spine, and was dead within seconds.

What did surprise everyone was the reaction of his daughters and nephew.

Hinata, though she seemed relatively unfazed, wore only white for several weeks afterwards and folded upwards of two hundred paper cranes within days.

Hanabi shut herself in her room and cried noisily for days.

Neji was a little more complicated. For a few hours, he said nothing. He sat in a chair, silent and contemplative. He thought about his uncle, everything he'd done, both the good and the bad. And he decided that while he was sad he was gone, he could more than live with it.

When Neji half-jokingly suggested to his cousins that they go out to celebrate, he was pelted with paper cranes.

**44**

Every shinobi has a sense of personal honor and morality, no matter how twisted.

_Kabuto laid the girl on the concrete ground at the top of the stands, the Inuzuka boy trailing close behind._

_The Hyuuga girl had been coughing for the better part of half an hour; there were blood flecks on her curled palm; even for one of her clan, she was deathly pale._

_Kabuto frowned behind the still reeking of blood neko mask. If he remembered correctly, this was the girl who had been brutalized and nearly killed by her cousin during the second exam. Well, he had a good idea what was wrong._

"_Hey! What're you—"_

"_It's alright. I'm a doctor."_

Someone_ had gotten sloppy healing the girl. During her fight with her cousin, the girl had torn an internal blood vessel near her lungs, and it had only been half-healed. It had lain dormant for the month between the second and third exams, and she had done something—it need not have been strenuous; she might have leaned forward too quickly in her seat—that had made it reopen._

_It wouldn't be hard for Kabuto to speed up the cell regeneration enough to make sure it healed _completely_ this time._

_When he was finished, the three made a slow descent back down the step to where the two rookies had been sitting, Kabuto carrying the semi-conscious girl and the Inuzuka following._

"_They won't let her out of the stands right now," Kabuto explained to the brown-haired boy, the two setting the girl back down in her seat. "It's standard procedure. After the exam is over, make sure she gets home without exerting herself too much. She should be alright; come find me again if something happens before the exam ends."_

_The Inuzuka boy's face slackened with relief. "Thanks, mister."_

Kabuto decided to help the Hyuuga girl because there was no point in just sitting by and letting her choke on her own blood, even if there was a good chance she'd be killed during the attack, not if he could do something to prevent her death. He helped her because there was enough time for him to do it before the signal and because it would lower the guard of those around him further, and finally because it wouldn't have been in the nature of his mask to just ignore her plight.

As for why he knocked out the Inuzuka boy and his dog instead of killing them?

Well, it would have taken too long, and Kabuto had a schedule to keep to.

**45**

When Deidara still lived in Iwagakure, he was apprenticed to a member of the ANBU Black Op.s.

Deidara had always tested high and it had been decided by the Tsuchikage that he would be integrated into the ANBU Black Op.s one day. He was apprenticed to the ANBU member to make his assimilation smoother.

Deidara's teacher had a simple work ethic: Get to the training ground on time and train until you're so tired you're ready to drop dead. Deidara also had a simple work ethic: Work when you want to.

The spirited argument that followed on their first day together set the tone for their relationship.

When they weren't actively trying to kill each other or drive each other into the straitjacket embrace of the nearest mental facility, Deidara and his master actually got along pretty well. It was Deidara's master who taught him how to utilize his mutation in battle, though, like most of Iwa, his master saw no use in and even ridiculed Deidara's hobby of shaping his explosive devices into artistic shapes.

Deidara calls Sasori 'danna' because he called his old master in Iwa 'danna'. Their reactions were about the same.

**46**

Sakura has her suspicions as to why Sai and Sasuke look so much alike. She also has her suspicions as to why Naruto and Deidara resemble each other so much and why there's a brunette in the Sand village who could be Tenten's black-eyed twin.

But when it comes to matters such as that, Sakura has learned to keep her mouth shut.

**47**

Out of all the boys Jiraiya trained or acted as a father/older brother figure to, Senju Nawaki, Nagato, Yahiko, Namikaze Minato, Uzumaki Arashi and Uzumaki Naruto, they all, according to him, had at least one thing in common.

They were all annoying as _hell_ when they wanted something.

**48**

During Gaara's confirmation as Godaime Kazekage, Kankuro stood in the corner of the room, brooding.

He was not thinking of how hard he, Gaara and Temari worked to see that day happen, nor how troublesome the jonin council was going to be in the next few months, nor even how giddily happy he should have been to see his baby brother achieving what he had dreamed of.

Kankuro was thinking of his father. Sabaku no Takeo had always groomed Temari to succeed him, since she was the eldest and the most politically savvy. In terms of political training, he had flatly ignored his younger children.

Now, Temari had refused to take the position and was instead the first ambassador to Konoha in thirty four years, Gaara was going to become the Kazekage and Kankuro would serve as a sort of unofficial advisor.

Kankuro thought that in Hell his father was either screaming his head off or laughing it off at the irony. When he thought of his mother taking a visit from Purgatory to beat the living daylights out of him, Kankuro smiled.

That goofy grin stayed on his face for the rest of the evening.

**49**

Chiyo's team of genin were legendary in their own day.

Sasori was without a doubt the finest puppeteer Sunagakure ever had; his puppetry and skill with poisons was unmatched, even by his own grandmother. Though all the members of the team were highly intelligent, he was the brains of the team, more cunning than any enemy they ever faced.

Karura was a Wind mistress, but what most didn't know was that she was also a generalist. She could blow away mountains and use the wind to slice through solid steel, but she could just as easily throw a punch and mix a poison. She had a smattering of genjutsu and medical ninjutsu, and could thread a chakra string just as every Suna shinobi could. If someone attacked her using what they assumed would be her weak area (taijutsu), she would simply measure them up and then use her iron fan to break their spines and then their skulls.

Yashamaru surpassed both Chiyo and Tsunade as a medical ninja. He had a mind no one could fathom; he could literally visualize new techniques to use against poisons and wounds and put them into practice. He immediately knew what was wrong with his patients when he saw them, and knew immediately what to do to aid them.

But unfortunately no one remembers that.

All anyone remembers about Sasori was that he was a missing nin, a traitor who fled and was for twenty years presumed to have been swallowed up by the desert.

All anyone remembers about Karura was that she gave birth to the dreaded jinchūriki and that she died cursing the village. Hardly anyone even _knows_ that she was ever a kunoichi, let alone one of the Three Mistresses of the Wind.

All anyone ever remembers about Yashamaru was what he was in his final days, a chunin driven mad who died trying to assassinate his own nephew. They didn't see him as the man who could have surpassed Tsunade as a med nin had he lived long enough. They saw a suspiciously hermaphroditic man who couldn't even heal himself after being attacked by his nephew again and again.

**50**

The first mission Naruto took as a chunin was to deliver documents to the Tsuchikage.

Immediately when he entered Iwagakure, things started getting strange. The guards stared at Naruto like he was the Devil, muttering "Yellow Flash" under their breaths and trying to edge as far away from him as they could without leaving their posts. Naruto was could have sworn he saw them crossing themselves after he passed.

In the close, dingy streets of Iwa, things were about the same. Small children looked up at him in horror while their mothers pulled them back into the small, tightly packed houses and apartments.

Older chunin and jonin, shinobi who were veterans of the Third War, glared and sneered at Naruto with undisguised loathing in their eyes, while the genin were whispered to by their senseis and started glaring too. One of them actually threw a kunai at Naruto, which he dodged and shrugged off, continuing on utterly bewildered.

The words "Yellow Flash" were still being bandied around the air.

Naruto was personally starting to find the whole thing to be extremely creepy.

When he got to the Tsuchikage's office, the old man looked like he was staring down Death itself when he laid eyes on Naruto. He stared openmouthed at him for about three seconds, pointing a shaky finger at him. The first words out of his mouth were muttered, "What devilry is this?"

The moment Naruto laid the papers down on the Tsuchikage's desk, he decided it would probably be best to beat a hasty retreat.

Unfortunately, he didn't get out of Iwa quite quickly enough. While Naruto was in the Tsuchikage's office, the shinobi and civilians outside had been mobilizing. Upon getting out of the Tsuchikage's office, Naruto was met by an increasingly ugly mob.

Naruto was lucky to get out of Iwa alive and the only thing that saved him was the intervention of a black-haired teenage girl and an older fair-haired man.

When he asked them why they had saved him, the older man answered, "You're the very image of my young cousin. He and my aunt and uncle all disappeared years ago, long before you were born."

To this day, Naruto has no idea what _any_ of that was about.

**51**

Thanks to Leaf purges of Suna kekkei genkais, apart from the arguably extinct Iron Sand kekkei genkai of the Sabaku clan (it is argued that the Sandaime's bloodline may have lived on in his grand nephew), the eleven surviving clans of Sunagakure possess no bloodline limits. That is not to say that their clans possess no special jutsus.

First, there are the four Blades of the Wind, one for each cardinal direction. The sword of the West belongs to the Sunatora, while the sword of the East is in the property of the Engetsu.

The South sword, owned by the Takeshi and wielded by Baki, is without a doubt the most efficiently deadly of the swords, but the North sword, in the ownership of the Sabaku is the most brutally powerful of any of the Blades of Wind, as evidenced when Sabaku no Takeo and his son Kankuro much later used the technique to cut up a Leaf patrol on different occasions.

Second, there are the Three Iron Fans. The legend goes that many centuries ago, there were three sisters who owned three enormous iron fans. All were terribly powerful, the Cherry Blossom fan belonging to the youngest sister, the Dragon fan belonging to the middle, and the most powerful, the Fan of Three Stars, belonging to the oldest sister.

The Cherry Blossom fan is wielded by the Kazehana clan, and is not currently in use since the prior user has retired and the future user is still in training.

The Dragon fan is in the possession of the Hiryuu clan, and is not in use either.

The Fan of Three Stars was originally not a fan belonging to a clan, but fell into the hands of the Sabaku after a user's marriage to a Sabaku man. The current user, Sabaku no Temari, also utilizes the weasel summoning contract her mother used.

By no means are the five remaining clans altogether ordinary. The Akasuna are extremely talented poisoners and practitioners of puppetry; the Yuuhi are highly skilled genjutsu users. The Hisakawa have a summoning contract with tarantulas that they use as spies and allies in combat. The Nobara have produced several skilled med nins and the Takeyari are famous for their taijutsu style.

The Leaf's attempts to weaken Sunagakure by eliminating all their kekkei genkai clans instead only strengthened it.

**52**

During the first set of Chunin exams in which Gaara and Tsunade were both attending as presiding kage's, they got to talking during the Third Exams.

Both of them were at their wits end because their councils thwarted their every attempt to reform the government, were stagnant and prejudiced and all-around out to get them in every way imaginable.

That night, Tsunade and Gaara further discussed their frustration over drinks, non-alcoholic in Gaara's case (For the sake of Suna's reputation, the Kazekage did not need a repeat of the last time he took sake). After several hours of talking and much attempts by Shizune and Temari to drag them back to their respective quarters, they realized they could help each other. And thus was their scheme put into action.

The jonin councils of both Suna and Konoha were put on a rotation cycle, of village elders being cycled every six months, and an elder could only be on the council once ever five cycles. The kage would be the only one allowed to decide who went on the council and who did not. The jonin commander was the only member who had a permanent seat on the council; since both Takeshi Baki and Nara Shikaku were steadfastly loyal to their respective kages, this was an equitable arrangement.

Utatane Koharu, Mitokado Homura and Shimura Danzo were summarily dismissed from the council with the promise that they would never be allowed back on, as were the most troublesome members of the Sunagakure jonin council.

The screams of frustration and anguish of what Tsunade termed "the goon squad" could be heard clear to Suna.

**53**

Kakashi, Anko, Iruka, Ibiki, Kurenai and Shizune have a tradition: Friday night is Movie night.

The six will put up with just about anything, from Ibiki's mind screwing films to Kurenai's nature documentaries. But there is one thing that is just too bizarre to put up with.

When they watch _Return of the Jedi_, whenever it comes to the point in which Princess Leia strangles Jabba the Hutt, Anko starts to snicker.

Considering Jabba was one of the main villains of the movie, the remaining five might not have considered this strange, except for one thing. She got a bizarre, abstracted look in her eye; the eerie little giggle was filled with a nasty pleasure.

The first time this happened, everyone who was sitting on the couch with her suddenly found excuses to be somewhere else, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the recliner, et cetera. Kurenai set a tripwire at all of the entrances into her house when she got home; Kakashi slept with a kunai gripped tightly in his hands; Shizune sniffed Anko's drink while the older kunoichi wasn't looking and considered having her friend committed; Iruka thanked God that he didn't have any students like her. Anko didn't notice; Ibiki just looked bored.

Every time they watched _Return of the Jedi _afterwards, the five were able to behave as though Anko wasn't displaying what might have been a cry for help in her sad, warped little mind, but they all made sure that Anko was relegated to an armchair and not to the couch.

Ibiki alone knows just why Anko gets a kick out of watching a scantily clad Leia strangle Jabba the Hutt. And he wishes he didn't.

**54**

Anko and Shizune found a lot more to talk about after Anko took Tenten as an apprentice in interrogation (and possibly a future apprentice in snake summoning) and Shizune took on Ino as a medical apprentice.

They exchanged tactics and tips on how to physically train their apprentices, and when Tenten suddenly had to start avoiding flying senbon needles and Ino was suddenly finding that her trainer was much more physical in her blows during dodge training, they both knew who to blame.

**55**

Aburame Shino has three younger sisters.

They all irritate him _immensely_. Nobuko and Hide always want to join him when he's out in nature communicating with the kikai, and Mura, the only one who doesn't play host to the kikai thanks to a congenital illness, just doesn't understand and thinks the kikai are "creepy". They chatter too much at the dinner table and interrupt him at his training.

Though he cares for her deeply, it is because of his own sisters that Shino once refused to think of Hinata as his little sister. He does not find her in the least annoying, but he was deep down bizarrely afraid that if he did start to think of her as a sister, it would make her annoying.

So he steadfastly only referred to her as a friend and comrade.

He started to change his mind after Kiba jokingly commented if _that_ was why he routinely scared ten years' growth out of every boy who had ever tried to ask Hinata out.

**56**

The kunoichi of the Konoha 12 all had one thing in common during their teenage years. They were all utterly oblivious when it came to the men they liked or liked them.

Tenten never had any idea that Neji liked her _that_ way until the day he blushingly asked her out, Naruto, Kiba, Shikamaru and Choji all giving him the thumbs-up from the background, Lee immediately challenging him to a duel to the death.

Sakura didn't know that she was both Lee and Naruto's silver medals (and it's a good thing she never found out; Lee upgraded her to gold anyway), or that Sasuke really did respect her.

Hinata never knew that she was the first girl Naruto liked, or that he still wanted to ask her out. When he finally did, she didn't faint; she asked him if he was being serious before breathlessly squealing _"YES!!!"_

Ino was utterly oblivious to the fact that Choji had almost mindlessly adored her from the day they first laid eyes on each other. Well, considering the way she wrapped him around her little finger on a daily basis, _that_ was debatable.

**57**

Jiraiya learned the hard way just how costly it was to allow Kushina anywhere near a cook pot.

One night when he and his team were out on a mission, Jiraiya left the fire to go get some more sticks to last them through the night. He left a pot of ramen boiling over it.

While he was gone, Kushina, Arashi and Minato drew straws and decided Kushina would be the one to look after their supper while Jiraiya was gone.

Kushina, whatever it was she did (Jiraiya never found out and honestly doesn't want to know), manage to botch it badly.

When Jiraiya got back to the camp, the fire was flaring out of control, the three were screaming and trying to put out the fire, and the pot of ramen laid spilled on the ground.

When Kushina ruined dinner, Jiraiya abruptly wheeled round and went somewhere to smoke his pipe until his lungs collapsed.

When Naruto pulled the same stunt so many years later, Jiraiya laughed.

**58**

During the Third War, a facility was discovered by a team of ANBU in the mountains near the border with the Earth Country.

The facility seemed to be recently abandoned and reeked of blood. Curious, the ANBU explored further.

What they found sickened even them and remains the stuff of nightmare in the minds of Konoha jonin to this day.

There was a room, filled with children. Many were corpses, but other where live children, children so horribly twisted, mutilated and deformed that they could hardly be called human anymore and were quietly and in secret put down by the team; the official report read that they had been found dead to avoid scandal.

Amid all the death and monstrosity, there was one living, perfectly normal boy, quiet and completely unscathed, healthy except that he suffered from malnourishment. Checking for identification, the ANBU did not have to look far; there was a silver bracelet on his wrist similar to the ones put on residents of detention facilities and mental asylums.

The boy's name was Tenzo, surname unknown. He was two and a half years old and his birthday was August the twenty-sixth.

They took him back to Konoha to run a DNA test, in an effort to reunite him with his family. That was when they discovered the full extent of what had been done to the sixty children found in the facility.

The boy's DNA was a genetic match to the Shodai Hokage. It was clear to all that he had not always been a genetic match to the Shodai; his body showed obvious signs of genetic tampering. But as it was, the boy was a half-clone of Senju Hashirama, and the gene for the Mokuton was present in his body.

The dead and deformed children also had the Shodai's DNA in their bodies; Tenzo was the only one whose body had not rejected the DNA injection. It was discovered only much later that Orochimaru had been responsible for the experiments.

Because his DNA and possibly even his appearance had been altered, it was impossible to track the boy's family, if he had any, and at any rate there was no one who was attempting to come forward to claim him.

Tenzo was unofficially adopted by the ANBU, trained to use the Mokuton, and became one of only five children in Konoha to ever be raised entirely by the ANBU.

To this day, if you were to ask him, Tenzo would reply that Kakashi is his older brother.

**59**

A team of ANBU found Itachi's body after his death partially at Sasuke's hands and partially due to his illness.

They did not hack off his head to take back to Konoha as proof of his death, nor did they leave him to rot and be scavenged by the crows he had so favored.

They instead buried his body, set up a marker, and promised to visit later.

Because the ANBU is and always will be a family, and an estranged brother is still a brother.

**60**

Tsunade first laid eyes on Tenzo while Shizune was taking the Genin Exams. She knew who the boy was and immediately she found herself comparing him to her grandfather.

Tenzo was at that point maybe eleven or twelve, tall and lanky for his age, with a laidback demeanor. He didn't seem like much, but then he was just a boy.

Tsunade resolved to keep an eye on him if ever she did return to the village, to see how he measured up.

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50: This would occur in a universe where Naruto doesn't know Minato's his father.


	4. 61 to 80

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

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**61**

Uzuki Yugao's surname was originally Mitarashi. After Orochimaru's defection her surname was changed to Uzuki to protect herself.

For the rest of their lives, Yugao and Anko kept up the pretense that they didn't know each other, to the point that Anko didn't attend Yugao's funeral when she fell in battle.

But she dreamt, she dreamt of a purple-haired girl and her kid sister, and Anko began silently to fold paper cranes.

**62**

Everyone who was a member of the Akatsuki at the time Sasori joined (Pein, Konan, Zetsu and Tobi/Madara) questioned why Sasori had chosen to attach a scorpion's tail to the modified human puppet Hiruko. They all assumed it was because Sasori had been named for the scorpion.

They were wrong. Hiruko had had a summoning contract with scorpions, who aided him in battle. To Sasori, it only seemed fitting.

**63**

Minato was not able to come up with the perfect seal for sealing a bijū into a child. At best, Minato was able to devise a seal that would remain stable for fifteen years, give or take, before it would start to break down, unfortunately coinciding with the time that someone who had been an infant at the time of sealing would be in the midst of turbulent adolescency.

Knowing he wouldn't be around to work on such a seal if he ever had to use it, Minato left behind instructions on how to reinforce the seal, hoping Jiraiya would find them. Jiraiya either never found them, didn't bother trying, or never knew they existed.

When Minato and Naruto met in the latter's mind, Minato's reinforcing his son's seal was not a permanent solution. Instead, he bought him some time, bought Naruto another fifteen years to either find his father's notes or to devise another way of reinforcing his seal before the process that had started when he was fifteen would start to repeat itself.

**64**

Namikaze Minato was born in Iwagakure, to civilians who were traveling to Konoha in search of a better life, and were killed on the journey there. He lived in a border village, living off of what he could steal and what others would begrudge him, until he was about five when a shinobi took him back to Konoha with him.

Minato never knew that his fair coloring, so much more common in northern countries like Tsuchi and Kaminari, was a prime marker of his ancestry, nor that it was only a lucky fluke that his Elemental Affinity was Fire when all of his shinobi relatives had Earth for their chakra nature.

When Minato was seventeen he was defeated in combat and nearly killed by an Iwagakure ANBU. The ANBU stopped short of killing him, his sword pressed at Minato's throat as the teenager laid on the soggy ground, only because he looked at features that practically mirrored what his own had been at that age, and realized that he was staring at the maternal cousin who had vanished into thin air with his parents so long ago. The ANBU promptly backed off and retreated with the rest of the Iwa forces. Minato gaped in confusion for nearly a minute afterwards until his senses returned and he regrouped with his sensei and teammates.

No one else in Iwa had the sense to put two and two together and connect the Scourge of Iwa with the large, politically inactive Namikaze clan of Iwagakure. The Namikaze had a reputation of being kin slayers, a bloody tradition Minato continued with his first kill. He was thirteen, the boy across him, a fair-faired Iwa genin with blue eyes the exact same shade as his own, the same age, and as Minato pulled his kunai out of the boy's temple, he felt like he ought to have known him. The boy was his paternal cousin, a member of the Main Family of the Namikaze.

A full third of the staggering kill count amassed by Minato against the Iwa shinobi during the Third War were related to him in some way. It peaked with Minato killing his grandfather in battle. He stared into his grandfather's dying cerulean eyes, and wondered why the old man looked so much like him.

Namikaze Minato's hands ran red with the lifeblood of his kin. He never knew this; it was probably better for his sanity that he did not.

The truth didn't even occur to him, when, a day after his confirmation as Yondaime Hokage, an anonymous note came to him by hawk, from Iwa, reading only one word.

'_Congratulations'._

**65**

Out of every single Hokage of Konoha, Naruto was the only one who had to keep pushing the hat up to keep it from falling into his eyes when he was first confirmed.

**66**

Jiraiya and Dan had a good system going for their relationship (or lack of one): Don't bother me, and I won't bother you. Dan gave Jiraiya a respectful amount of distance when the latter wanted to talk/discuss/argue with Tsunade, and Jiraiya was content to be coolly polite to Dan in public and cordially despise him in private.

That changed when they were sent alone on a mission together.

The near-impenetrable forest on the border of Hi and Tsuchi worked both in Jiraiya and Dan's favor and against them as well. The terrain was utterly unfamiliar, even if it did provide shelter and places to hide, and treacherous, with springs and pools hidden beneath the white blankets of snow. It was bitterly cold, locked in the depths of winter, and even if it was high noon, from the amount of light that pierced the dense canopy of dark pine needles, it seemed more like an unending gloomy dusk.

And the kunai and shuriken that kept flying out of the gloom didn't help, either.

Dan and Jiraiya couldn't get their bearings long enough to figure out how many enemy shinobi were attacking them. From the make of the weapons, made of a duller, darker metal than Konohagakure kunai and shuriken, and the location the pair found themselves in, they were almost certainly up against Rock nin, something that definitely boded ill for them.

For one night, they were left alone, a night in which the pair huddled in a great depression beneath two mammoth slabs of stone, huddling next to a meager, sooty fire, silent and grim. Jiraiya had caught a shuriken with his hand earlier in the evening; while his glove had spared him of the worst of the damage, his hand still throbbed and screamed like an abscessed tooth, and he had spurned Dan's offers to heal it. They fell into a troubled sleep, weak and light.

When dawn came, they woke to find blades at their throats.

The band of four were indeed the missing nin from Iwa Jiraiya and Dan had been looking for, and Jiraiya cursed the negligence that had allowed the Rock nin to get the drop on them.

The four wore masks, keeping Jiraiya and Dan from telling one from the other. They were shoved to their knees on the ground, hands roughly pressing on their necks and feet on the middle of their backs. For a few moments, the seeming leader of the group looked down at them through the eye slits of his blank mask (they were obviously mocking Hunter nin masks with their porcelain masks), before motioning to one of the men.

That man dragged Dan to his feet and roughly shoved him about twenty feet to the east, before the crony pushed him back to the ground to where the medic was spitting out snow and dirt when his head came back up.

The leader then removed his mask, revealing a heavily scarred face. He leered down at Dan with an utterly baleful grin hovering in his crooked teeth; Dan's eyes widened in pure shock.

The man was Ijin Hiroki, a notorious nin from Iwa; his face had adorned the "Most Wanted" section of the Bingo Book so completely that Jiraiya would have known him anywhere; he had a bounty of 18,100,000 ryo on his head.

Hiroki muttered two words that carried clear to Jiraiya's ears, and made him stiffen with foreboding.

'_Remember me?'_

The way Dan's lips curled back in a twisted snarl indicated he did.

It was at this point that Jiraiya blew a fireball at the man standing in front of him.

The forest erupted into battle. Dan broke free of his captors just as Jiraiya did, and instead of regrouping with Jiraiya, he went straight at Hiroki. Whatever their enmity was, it predated Jiraiya's acquaintance with the medic. This set off warning bells in Jiraiya's head; what he knew of Dan told him that he was normally a level-headed, calculating soldier in battle, but he saw none of that in the forest. What he saw instead was a wild, nearly unthinking warrior who clearly wasn't fighting with a clear mind. Despite that, he fought well, better than Jiraiya had thought any med nin but Tsunade capable of.

Jiraiya's fireballs loosened several layers of snow on the upper branches of the pine trees, and they came crashing down, adding to the confusion. Jiraiya managed to incinerate two of them before another stabbed him in the side by the third.

The enemy never got the chance to finish the job. He fell down stone dead, one of Dan's kunai sticking out of his forehead, oozing sluggish blood and yellow fluid onto the snow.

Instead of stopping to heal Jiraiya, Dan went on against Hiroki. Finally, he disabled the man, breaking both of his arms. Hiroki was standing at the bank of a small spring; Jiraiya's fireballs had melted the cap of ice over it. Dan took one cold, calculating look at him, his battle madness forgotten, and pushed Hiroki in.

And held him down.

It was a full two minutes before the hapless missing nin's struggles finally ceased, and he was finally dead.

Dan said nothing as he healed Jiraiya's wound, nor as he helped the much-heavier man up and back into their cave. He sealed the corpses into a scroll, murmuring, "_We have to bring them back to Konoha, Natsumi_—" his older sister _"—mentioned that the Experimentation Division of the Medical Corp. have been looking for cadavers to practice new jutsus on, and the smell of rotting flesh will attract every predator and scavenger in this forest_," plopped down on the ground in the cave, and used Jiraiya's lighter to start and some dry brush to start a fire. All the while, he was eerily calm; Jiraiya held onto a kunai in his lap.

Then, Dan pulled a picture out of his coat pocket, and showed it to Jiraiya. It was an old picture, several years old with the edges curling and yellow. Dan was in it, along with his sister Natsumi, then heavily pregnant with her first child, but there was a third person in the photo.

It was a teenage girl who looked much like Natsumi and Dan, with long silver-blue hair, ocean blue eyes, and a dazzling smile. _"My younger sister, Hideyo_".

With some prodding, Dan went on and gave a graphic, gut-wrenching description of how, years ago during the Second War, Dan and his sister had been caught by Hiroki and another Iwa shinobi and Dan, incapacitated, had been forced to watch as Hiroki repeatedly raped, tortured and finally killed the girl over the course of eight and a half hours.

"_She was seventeen," _Dan murmured lifelessly. _"She was about to take the jonin exams. She would have been twenty-three this year. By the time they killed her, I could barely recognize her anymore."_

Jiraiya felt his mouth grow dry while Dan related this tale. He had heard the like from many survivor of Iwa attacks (always Iwa; the Sand ninja were too efficient for that sort of thing, the Kumo too hasty), and his response was always the same.

If Jiraiya had been in Dan's shoes, he would have done the exact same thing. Except he would have incinerated Hiroki. Slowly.

When they got back to Konoha's gates, Tsunade was waiting for them, and Dan was able to behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Tsunade could not figure out why the two of them were suddenly on so much better terms, and even asked if they were enemy nin henged to look like Dan and Jiraiya, but Jiraiya brushed her off.

There were just some things about Tsunade's lover and Jiraiya's newfound drinking buddy that she was probably better off _not_ knowing.

**67**

Beyond microwavable ramen, Uzumaki Kushina couldn't cook to save her life. It was a testament to how much he loved her that Minato not only ate her cooking but actually _liked_ it.

**68**

After the destruction of Uzu no Kuni by Kiri forces three years into the Second War, refugees flooded into Konoha and Suna, being, with an almost painful slowness, assimilated into the villages they fled to.

One of the refugees who was begrudgingly admitted into Sunagakure was an eleven-year-old genin named Kaisui Sayuki.

Sayuki was a small, scrappy girl, not much to look at, continuing a long tradition of kunoichi living during times of trouble maintaining an almost aggressive indifference to her appearance. She had copper brown hair hacked off above the shoulders, eyes the color of old hardwood, and fair skin that soon housed an olive tan.

Sayuki was to become the only great Water manipulator ever to occupy the Suna ranks, her mastery and raw power outmatched only by the likes of the Nidaime Hokage and Hoshigaki Kisame. She could summon a massive tsunami in the middle of the arid desert, and when she was stationed on the coast small hurricanes tended to herald her arrival into battle.

But the first six years of her career as a Suna shinobi were, for wartime, ordinary, even mundane. Sayuki, as a former nin from another village, was not give a great deal of freedom and was assigned to help guard the village walls. She made chunin at fifteen, having failed the examination the first two times she took it. Sayuki managed to exist under the radar for six long years, seeming to be nothing but a perfectly ordinary kunoichi.

Then, in the final year of the Second War, the Leaf got closer to Suna than they ever got before or would get again, close enough that the guards were called into combat.

The Sandaime Kazekage was aiding his men in combat, and he got to a sand dune just in time to witness the teenaged Sayuki blast an entire Leaf platoon to infinity with a wall of water. Sayuki was immediately transferred to the coast.

The war only continued on for six months, but in those six months Kaisui Sayuki was personally responsible for the wholesale destruction of Konoha's entire naval fleet when she drew up a Category Four hurricane to smash no les than sixty ships over forty miles of coastline. Konoha still has no viable navy.

To say that Suna was ecstatic would have been an understatement.

Sayuki was promoted to jonin at twenty, and at the outbreak of the Third War was deployed to the northern front to help stop the onslaught of Leaf forces there. She counted the high point of her career as seeing the look on Senju Tsunade's face when she was hit by a tidal wave a Sand kunoichi generated.

Sayuki eventually had a daughter she named Sari in honor of her adopted village. She would die three years after the girl was born, dead from some airborne illness caught in a military base to the west.

Kaisui Sayuki, legendary Water manipulator of the Sand, left only one legacy: the pathological fear of running water she inspired in nearly every Leaf nin who ever survived an encounter with her.

**69**

A little known fact is that Jiraiya has only ever had sexual intercourse with one woman. An even lesser known fact (known at first only to Jiraiya himself) is that this makes Morino Ibiki Naruto's maternal uncle.

**70**

Ibiki is at an utter loss for words when Tsunade smugly informs him that he and Uzumaki Naruto are uncle and nephew. He refuses to believe that the fifteen-year-old runt with a disproportionately loud mouth, who only got through the preliminaries of the Chunin exam _because_ of his loud mouth, is in any way, shape or form related to him, and Ibiki almost manages to convince himself that the sake he drank last night is affecting his mental faculties in some way. That is, until Tsunade furnishes the DNA records.

The results are definitive. They confirm that Ibiki and Naruto share the required number of chromosomes to be second-degree relatives, and that they share the same number of chromosomes with Uzumaki Kushina, Naruto's mother and, evidently, Ibiki's half-sister.

Ibiki's answer is to promptly bow out of Tsunade's sunlit office and to behave as though their meeting never took place.

Later, Ibiki is eating at his favorite open-air restaurant when he hears what he is certain is the death knell of his dignity sounding.

_Ibiki covers his eyes with his hand. "Armageddon in three, two, one…"_

"_Jisan!"_

"_Ugh…"_

Tsunade plays _dirty._

With all his impressive powers of persuasion, Ibiki strives to convince Naruto that they are not related, and that even if their DNA is similar, they simply are not.

But more than anything, Ibiki wants the brat to _stop calling him jisan._

All to no avail. It would have taken several hours at least to crack into the blond's hard skull, let alone wind his little mind around what Ibiki wants him to believe.

And just when Ibiki thinks it can't possibly get worse…

"_Ibiki! This scruffy little runt is your nephew?!"_

Anko hears everything that they have said, and promptly dissolves into piercing, hysterical laughter. Ibiki shudders; if this keeps up, the whole village will know.

But for now, he can think of a way of possibly killing two birds with one stone.

"_Alright, gaki, you want me to acknowledge you?"_

"_Yes!"_

"_Fine. If you are really related to me, then you should be able to think up a way of shutting Anko up without getting killed."_

With any luck, Ibiki thinks, Anko'll kill him and…

And Ibiki turns around and finds Naruto beaming at him and Anko struggling to get a piece of chakra-charged paper off of her mouth.

Ibiki, a hard man to surprise, is so impressed that he decides that Naruto may be related to him after all. He managed to shut up Anko, and he'll actually live to tell the tale, so Ibiki figures he might as well acknowledge him.

On the condition that Naruto never, _ever_ calls Ibiki "jisan" again.

Ibiki sits Naruto down and immediately begins to impart every single interrogation tactic he has ever learned on the young boy. If Naruto wants to be Hokage, he's going to need it to deal with the council.

Anyone and everyone who manages to wrap their minds around the concept of Ibiki and Naruto being related comes to the same conclusion.

It is the single most frightening thing they have ever heard.

**71**

If you were to ask Kabuto, he would tell you that Kimimaro was _much_ easier to deal with than Sasuke.

**72**

In the depths of Sound, Sasuke used to dream of Team Seven. He dreamed of the few (all too few) good times they shared, when even then his life had been shadowed and blighted by Itachi.

He dreamed of a lackadaisical sensei who couldn't get his act together yet had been more of a father to Sasuke than Uchiha Fugaku had ever been. He dreamed of a stupid, earnest girl who kept declaring her undying love for him, and above all, Sasuke dreamed of a scrawny little blond runt who just didn't get it. They were all smiling.

The image shattered.

When, years later, Team Seven finally laid eyes on each other again, Sasuke didn't dream of them smiling anymore.

He dreamt of the savage joy he would feel when their blood and flesh crawled in his hands. Sasuke dreamt of how much stronger he would be, how much more ready he would be to face Itachi, once he killed them.

**73**

To say that learning he was wrong about Itachi only _after_ he killed him hurt Sasuke would have been an understatement.

It _destroyed_ him.

**74**

After he came home injured from a mission, Shikamaru found himself with a visitor in the hospital. Temari had wanted to check up on him to make sure he really was recovering, and when she took in all the bandages, she cattily remarked that he looked more like a mummy than a Leaf chunin.

They talked about battle and injuries and close people, and somehow throughout this, they ended up making out upright on Shikamaru's hospital bed.

Well this was all fine and good, and both actually found it quite enjoyable.

Until Gaara and Kankuro stepped into the room and found them like that.

Shikamaru, despite his infirmity, found the strength to pull his flak jacket back on over his bandaged chest and his shoes on and, for his health, immediately split the wind getting out of the hospital.

As he raced up the high street, the two younger brothers of the girl he'd been making out with chasing close behind, both Tsunade and Baki, from different locations, had the opportunity to witness the scene.

Nara Shikamaru, running like the legions of Hell wanted to tear him apart.

Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, Akimichi Choji, Yamanaka Ino and Inuzuka Kiba all exuberantly screaming _"Run for it!!!"_

The Kazekage and his older brother tearing after Shikamaru, murder written plainly on their faces.

Temari running behind her brothers, fan drawn, clearly intending to prevent a riot.

Tsunade and Baki's reactions were exactly the same.

"_Kakashi, pass the sake."_

"_Shizune!!!"_

**75**

During the early years of the Second War, the Sandaime Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen was in a border town in the north of Hi no Kuni, waiting for a reconnaissance team to get back with information from the northern front.

It was midday, and Sarutobi hadn't been able to eat anything since the morning before, so he was definitely going to enjoy his sandwich. That is, he was going to enjoy it, until a little boy snatched it off his plate and ran off.

Well, Sarutobi wasn't going to let that slide. He might have been nearing forty, but he was in good shape and he was _hungry_. He didn't think it would be too much trouble to catch the scruffy little brat.

Sarutobi was wrong. The boy knew the terrain of the city and led him on a merry chase for nearly an hour, losing the sandwich in the process. The urchin climbed up side staircases, scrambled over cloth awnings, ran down alleys and jumped roofs.

He eventually crawled into a culvert, which was ultimately his undoing. Sarutobi blocked off one end with a crate and simply sat over the other end, knowing that eventually the boy would have to come out. When he did (after another hour), Sarutobi unceremoniously grabbed him by the back of his grubby shirt and pulled him to face him.

The boy, Sarutobi discovered to his chagrin, could be no older than five years old. He was obviously a street urchin, by the ratty state of his clothes and his painful thinness. He had hair that Sarutobi could just barely tell was golden beneath all the grime, and bright blue eyes that were extraordinarily cheerful despite his wretched conditions.

Though Sarutobi was very much embarrassed that a five-year-old had managed to elude him for so long, it impressed him as well. He decided he'd take the boy back to Konoha with him and put him in the Academy when he was old enough. He asked the boy his name.

"_Namikaze Minato! Who are you supposed to be?"_

_Sarutobi smiled. "Sarutobi Hiruzen, Sandaime Hokage."_

_The boy blinked, then his grin widened. He extended a hand. "Nice to meet ya, Hokage-sama."_

They went back to the stand and got _two_ sandwiches.

**76**

Hatake Kakashi and Maito Gai were in the same year in the Academy, but they never really knew each other until they were about thirteen.

It had been a month since Obito's death, a month in which Kakashi did very little but mope, brood, stand by the cenotaph and binge on sake even though he was eight years too young. Neither Rin nor Minato had been capable of bringing him out of it, but Gai was determined to try.

You see, Gai had always admired Kakashi from a distance, admiring him for his consummate skill and his 'coolness'.

But now, he was disgusted with him as well. Gai had recently lost his teammates and sensei in battle, but he wasn't atrophying and rotting the way Kakashi was. He knew that wasn't the way to honor their memories. And Gai had known Obito, and they had been friends. He was going to make Kakashi see the light.

So he made his mind up.

Kakashi was in for a rude awakening.

Gai marched up to the cenotaph one misty morning, found Kakashi there (as usual), and started to do what he did best. Annoy the person he was talking to.

He rattled on and on about nothing, until he got to the matter in question. And then all hell promptly broke loose.

The moment the word 'Obito' came out of Gai's mouth, Kakashi jumped on him. And thus started what Minato, who had been watching from a tree, called the 'most pathetic fight of Kakashi's career', and the only knock down drag out brawl to take place in front of the cenotaph.

Kakashi was too drunk for ninjutsu, genjutsu, or anything even remotely resembling decent taijutsu, and Gai didn't want to hurt him too much. They essentially rolled around on the ground, kicking, hitting, hair-pulling and biting, until they were both too exhausted to do anything but lie flat on their backs and pant.

The moment the mist cleared from Kakashi's mind, he started to sob. And did not stop until Minato came down and took them both back to his apartment to talk it out.

Kakashi and Gai have been best friends ever since.

**77**

After Rin died, Kakashi and Gai took care of Naruto equally until he was about five. They tried to shield the toddler from the mob, but most of the time to no avail.

Finally, one day, when Naruto was four, they were holed up in Kakashi's apartment and Kakashi himself was dabbing at a cut on the toddler's forehead did they finally decide to do something definitive about it.

"_This is getting ridiculous," Kakashi muttered, sitting small Naruto on his lap and taking the rubbing alcohol. "Now," he murmured to the boy, "this is going to sting a bit."_

_As Kakashi dabbed at the boy's forehead, Gai came out of the kitchen. "I agree," Gai asserted grimly._

_Kakashi looked up at him, visible eye glinting coolly. "So why don't we do something about it?"_

"_What did you have in mind?"_

They knew where the leaders of the mob lived, and they were shinobi, able and willing to use intimidation.

Some of the leaders of the mob woke up the next morning with their houses vandalized, the panes of their windows sitting neatly in their front yards or in their kitchens if they lived in apartments, every single piece of furniture destroyed, and straw-stuffed effigies of themselves sitting in the middle of their living rooms, covered in chicken blood, the burlap stomachs slashed and spaghetti hanging out of it to represent intestines.

Some of the more violent leaders of the mob never woke up at all.

Either way, the people got the message.

No one ever tried to hurt Naruto again.

**78**

Uchiha Shisui's favorite hobby in his spare time was to make sure Itachi didn't stagnate. In response, Itachi's favorite hobby in his limited spare time was to infuriate Shisui as much as possible.

**79**

Gekko Hayate's chronic illness wasn't a matter of much concern to Genma. After all, Hayate always said he just had allergies, and Genma believed him.

That was, of course, until the day Hayate started coughing up blood instead of phlegm.

**80**

Yugao always wondered. Hayate would have been dead within a few years, even if that Sand nin—whoever he was—hadn't killed him. His "allergies" had morphed into something far more deadly (Yugao shuddered to think of the shadow existing over his nephew Udon, who had the same illness that threatened to turn into the same life threatening issue Hayate had had), something that involved coughing up blood and toxic medications that left him even weaker than before.

Not enough time, not enough time. That had always characterized their relationship. Not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the week… And suddenly not enough years in Hayate's life. Everything had been put on high speed suddenly, as emphasized by the engagement ring Yugao still harbored in her little apartment.

But then, everything had just stopped.

Yugao always wondered if the way the Sand nin had killed Hayate would have been more merciful than what his own body would have eventually done to him.

* * *

64: The potential for shock value was just huge.  
66: 18,100,000 ryo equals about $20,000, U.S.  
69 and 70: I have an evil mind, I know. I just couldn't resist.


	5. 81 to 100

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

* * *

**81**

The only reason Dan ever wanted to be Hokage was so that little teenaged kunoichi wouldn't have to worry about having their guts ripped out and their dignity mangled by Iwa shinobi.

The only reason Dan wanted to be Hokage was so that he would never to look down at the stone cold face of a teenaged kunoichi on an autopsy table and be reminded of his sister again.

**82**

Jiraiya never had a surname. He was an illegitimate child sired by a father who already had a wife and son and thus would not acknowledge him, and it was sort of unspoken knowledge between him and his older half-brother that they were in fact related, unspoken knowledge that they never verbally acknowledged but allowed to flourish, making them close friends.

Jiraiya never attempted to claim his heritage, but he wasn't sure he'd made the right decision until the day he saw the dead eyes of the child his brother left behind.

Then he knew he'd made the right decision.

**83**

After his father died, Kakashi came into Jiraiya's care, as Sakumo had outlined Jiraiya as the one to take legal guardianship of Kakashi if he died before the boy became of age to live by himself.

Jiraiya and Kakashi themselves didn't have much interaction. Jiraiya was strangely uncomfortable in Kakashi's presence, and took whatever excuse he could to absent himself from the boy's presence.

Kakashi came under the care of the three older children who lived with Jiraiya, Namikaze Minato and the Uzumaki twins. In particular, Minato.

Kakashi and Minato already knew each other, and Minato soon basically started taking care of the six-year-old. Even though Kakashi was a chunin, he was a chunin who had gotten through the Exam purely on nerves, he was only six, and many of the techniques of a shinobi, such as advanced chakra control, ninjutsu, genjutsu and taijutsu were still something he had yet to master.

When, a year later, Minato made jonin, he almost immediately assumed a position as Kakashi's sensei. Kakashi soon after got a crash course in how much taijutsu training _hurt._

**84**

Obito and Kurenai met about a month after she was released from the hospital and "taken in" by a family in Konohagakure.

Kurenai was sitting on the stoop of her new house, just staring into space. The reason Obito walked up to her was that he saw a pretty girl and wanted to go introduce himself.

After a slightly rough start that involved dango sticks and an errant alley cat, Obito and Kurenai became friends, much more quickly than Asuma had managed to befriend her.

The first thing about herself that Kurenai ever willingly volunteered about herself was that she hated the rain. Obito decided to start carrying an umbrella.

Kurenai spent much of her spare time in the Uchiha compound, where Uchiha clansmen decided that only two misfits of Kurenai and Obito's proportions could become such good friends, and the latter's parents resolved to put up with their failure son being friends with a girl from an enemy village if it meant that Obito actually picked up something about genjutsu in the process.

Obito and Kurenai noticed none of this. Soon, Maito Gai, another social reject, became the third member of their little gang and they spent many of their days staying out after class was over until the sun went down, sometimes longer—there were days when Kurenai just couldn't stand to be in the same house as the trio of men who dared try to usurp her birth family's place in her heart. Gai was the one Obito learned real taijutsu from, and used it to great effect while on missions.

Without intending it, Kurenai stopped being a social reject the day she became a genin, and girls and boys in her year and the year below her alike noticed how pretty she was. The reactions varied; the boys, for the most part, tended to trip over themselves to do small tasks for her, and the girls either cultivated her friendship or outright _loathed_ her. Either way, Yuuhi Kurenai definitely did not exist under the radar anymore.

And as they got older, Obito for the life of him could not figure out why half the boys in his year and hers, Kurenai's teammates Asuma and Ibiki in particular, glowered so fiercely at him when they were together. Then again, maybe he could.

**85**

During the gathering planned among Obito's genin and chunin friends at the cenotaph, it was noticed that Kakashi was not in attendance. Despite her decided ambivalence about Kakashi, it was Kurenai who rallied the troops to go look for him, if nothing else wanting to chew him out for not showing up.

The "troops", as it was, was a small gang at that time consisting of and for that particular venture led by Kurenai, her teammates Asuma and Ibiki, Rin, Ebisu, Gai, and its newest members, Anko, Izumo and Kotetsu, who were two years younger than Gai, Rin, the late member Obito, and the missing member Kakashi.

They finally found him at a bar in the West End, the industrial district and the seediest part of town; figures, since no one else would have catered sake to a thirteen-year-old. Rin and Izumo were both nervous just being there, and honestly Kurenai couldn't blame them, but the way she saw it they all had a job to do; Asuma and Gai backed her up on that.

She spent about fifteen minutes persuading Kakashi to leave the bar and come back to one of their houses, and the moment Kakashi did finally start walking, he promptly started throwing up.

Now, this might not have been a problem except for the fact that Kakashi had pulled up his face mask before getting up. He choked on his own vomit and spittle for nearly fifteen seconds before one of them, once again Kurenai, broke free of paralysis and, glaring hatefully at Rin (a med nin should have reacted immediately), dragged him off into an alley, roughly jerked down his face mask, and successfully performed the Heimlich maneuver on him.

Kurenai did _not_ stick her fingers in his mouth to check for any remaining…_obstructions_. That duty she was more than happy to pawn off to Rin, who sat him down and disgustedly began rooting around in his mouth. After she was done, he promptly passed out.

When Kakashi woke up, he had a splitting headache and he was lying on a tatami mat in a darkened room. Kurenai was sitting cross-legged one mat over.

"_Okay, bucko—" Kurenai's voice was much too loud for Kakashi's liking "—listen up._

"_Let's get one thing straight. I don't really like you that much. I think we're agreed that the feeling's mutual. But quite frankly, Obito looked at you as a friend, as a close friend, so for his sake me and the others are going to be making sure you don't kill yourself._

"_Get used to us, Kakashi. Your life is about to get much more crowded."_

Kurenai made it clear that he didn't have much of a choice; she and the others _would_ be checking up on him and keeping him company, whether he liked it or not.

Kakashi, for his part, blew her off and decided he was going to let himself out.

Kurenai let him go, but before he left she gave him something to remember her by. Kakashi felt a hand light on his shoulder and turned around just in time to see Kurenai's left fist collide with his nose.

It was a month before Kakashi accepted the company of the gang with anything but begrudging tolerance.

Kurenai and Kakashi have since learned to get along better.

**86**

A few years after the fall of the Akatsuki, the Gedō Mazō statue was mysteriously destroyed, freeing the seven bijū that were captured within its depths.

This, of course, provided for an almost unparalleled degree of chaos in the nations as for the first time in decades seven bijū at one time tore up the countryside. Amegakure barely got out alive, most of its military and civilian population utterly decimated, before the beasts decided that they had bigger fish to fry.

A familiar pattern started to be established, albeit with some minor differences. The Nibi made its way towards Kumo, the Raikage and his brother sealing it into an infant girl. The Yonbi cut a path to Iwa, and was alone instead of accompanied by the Gobi; the Gobi had in fact been captured by an Ame shinobi. The Nanabi went to Kusa instead of Taki; the Sanbi and Rokubi, being bijū who were commonly associated with water or wet places, went to their usual haunts, Mizu no Kuni, and were captured and sealed.

When the Shukaku was sighted on the wastes of northern Wind, Gaara had a difficult decision to make. He was eighteen at the time, and he had been enjoying three years without the shadow of the Shukaku over his life.

Naturally, the Ichibi no Tanuki would have to be stopped for the sake of Sunagakure. There was the option of simply having it sealed in a teapot indefinitely, but Gaara feared what a successor might do with the Ichibi if that course of action was pursued.

He would not see the Shukaku sealed into a child. Gaara had all too vivid memories of the way his childhood had been blighted by that thing, and he would not doom another child to suffer the same fate. Never.

That left the problem of what to do with the Shukaku. Eventually, Gaara came to a decision. A decision which his siblings, his council and most of the population of Suna fiercely protested.

Gaara, his siblings were convinced, had finally lost touch with reality. Yes, they were quite sure that baby brother had lost his mind. They did everything they could to dissuade him from his chosen course of action, Temari even threatening to strike him over the head and have him locked up for the rest of his life.

Gaara, for his part, displayed his inner stubbornness and used his sand to transport Temari's fan to the roof.

The decision entailed Gaara having the Shukaku sealed back inside of himself. His stretched chakra coils could easily accommodate the Shukaku's chakra, and he knew what to expect from the desert fiend.

Eventually, when he finally got fed up with his sibling and council's protests, he pulled the "I am Kazekage and you will do what I tell you to" card (everyone who had known his father agreed that Gaara had never resembled his father more than when he went before the council and threatened to do something along the lines of throwing them all out of the building, head-first, through the top storey window) and got an Akasuna elder to perform the sealing process.

At first, the Shukaku was delighted that it got its old host/whipping boy back, having fond memories of all the utter terror he had ever inflicted on Gaara. That is, until Gaara established ground rules.

Gaara the eighteen-year-old had a considerably stronger will than Gaara the fetus, and he was willing to enforce unconditional terms on the Shukaku. The terms were something along the lines of _"You will do this and this and this," _and "_You are never to do this or that or that_, or "_So help me God I will get that elder to take you right back out, regardless of what happens to me in the process."_

The biggest stipulation, however, was that the Shukaku would let Gaara sleep in peace.

The Shukaku, having vivid memories of what it had been like for the Akatsuki to rip him out of his host's body, found itself agreeing before it really knew what it was saying.

Gaara's next action after that was to pen letters to all the village leaders who had recently acquired new jinchūriki hosts. In those letters, Gaara made it very clear that if the jinchūriki were trained to be soulless weapons, mistreated, abused, persecuted, neglected or were left unappreciated for their burden in any way, shape or form, those leaders would expect to find an empty bed where the child had been before, and the next time they saw that child would be when they were a shinobi with a Suna hitai-ate at their foreheads.

Only the Raikage and Tsunade found anything humorous about the letter when they got their copy. And subsequently they were the only ones who found anything funny about it when the Yonbi jinchūriki disappeared from Iwagakure.

The rest of them were too freaked out to be mad.

**87**

As an old man, Kakashi one day found a young kunoichi with a Kumo hitai-ate standing on his front doorstep. She was a tall girl, with long, thick brown hair tied back behind her head and emerald green eyes with peculiar slits for pupils.

She unceremoniously introduced herself as Yousei Kokoro, jerked down the collar of her shirt to expose her neck, informed him that she was the Nibi jinchūriki and that she had Yugito's memories.

Kakashi let her in immediately.

**88**

Tsunade was giddy with glee when she named Naruto as her successor. She had been grooming the boy for political leadership for a year and a half, and he had finally become adept enough at politics—just barely—that she felt she could hand over leadership of the village to him without Konoha falling into complete and total anarchy within seconds.

And Naruto needed the political tutoring too, for he was to be the first Hokage not to come into power during a time of trouble or upheaval. Instead of just being a military leader, he was going to be a civil and political authority as well, a leader in an unprecedented time of peace.

Naruto was going to find that being Hokage was slightly more boring than he anticipated, but that certainly didn't do anything to dampen his enthusiasm for the job. Tsunade pawned off the hat to him late in October. His speech was short and to the point; the first thing that happened afterwards was Ibiki, Tsunade, Kakashi and Iruka dragging him off for some under aged drinking; Iruka was the only one pointing out that Naruto wasn't technically old enough to drink at the time. They all ignored him.

As for Tsunade, the reason she was so gleeful? Well, she could finally drink without interruption, sleep in as long as she wanted and she wouldn't have to be waking up at the crack of dawn with a _gigantic_ hangover to the sound of Shizune insisting that she get up and work.

It worked out well for everyone in the end.

**89**

A few years after Naruto was declared Hokage at the age of twenty, Tsunade died.

Enemy shinobi had taken the opportunity of Konoha's laxity during a village holiday to attack the village, assaulting it from the west wall.

Eventually, the walls were breached, and the Konoha forces were called into action to defend the village.

It was a bloody battle, to say the least, the cost of which was many of the lives of Konoha's military forces, including Tsunade's.

Tsunade was by then sixty-three years old, and though no one dared say it to her face her reflexes and senses were starting to slow. On top of that, she was experiencing the beginnings of arthritis in her limbs, something she ruthlessly suppressed. She might not have admitted it, and she certainly didn't look it, but Tsunade was beginning to feel her age.

Tsunade gave it all she had in the fight, and for a while it looked like all the enemy was going to do was run from her (She just had _that_ sort of reputation). But then, a rookie stepped forward.

This rookie was one of those young shinobi who were overawed by legends, but was determined to take her down for that very reason. This rookie was one of those young men who were reckless and daredevils of the highest degree, who wanted to prove themselves. This kid had something to prove.

And prove it he did. Tsunade wasn't a pushover by any means, but even she had little defense against long-range water attacks that flooded an entire street and left most of the Leaf shinobi in it dead.

Needless to say, the seal Jiraiya devised so many years ago had to be brought in to play once Naruto found out about it. He calmed down when he saw the enemy nin running away as though they had a demon after them. Except that they really _did_ have a demon after them.

After Tsunade died, Shizune just left. She had no real reason to stay in Konoha; she had no family left alive and the whole reason she had come back in the first place was because Tsunade had come back. She had concluded Ino's medical training, and had even found the time to further Hinata's medical training and give Neji a decent grounding in medical ninjutsu, and there was really not much left for her in Konoha.

The reformed council was much more reasonable than the last; the thought to declare her missing nin didn't even occur to them. And if it had, Naruto would have vetoed it before they could even get the notion out of their mouths.

Shizune never came back to Konoha, though Naruto was almost certain he saw her in a village in one of the northern countries, over twenty years later.

He couldn't be sure. He saw a tall woman with silver streaks in her short black hair, her skin relatively unlined. He saw her for just a moment, and when he turned back to the place in the market where she had been, she was gone.

**90**

Naruto and Hinata were in each other's company a lot more after Hinata suddenly started haunting the ramen stand. Truth be told, Hinata didn't like ramen all that much, but after rousing pep talks on Kurenai, Tenten and Ino's parts and promises of horrific bodily mutilation by Kiba, Shino, Neji and Hanabi if anything went wrong, she summoned up her courage and marched off to finally have a full-length conversation with her long-time secret love.

It was about this time that Hinata started to painstakingly overcome her stutter. Naruto noticed.

Hinata eventually developed an acquired tasted for ramen and actually enjoyed the food while she was there. Naruto and Hinata, amazingly, found a lot to talk about, but that was _not_ how they started dating.

How they started dating was a somewhat different matter. Hinata one day blushingly asked Naruto if he wanted to practice with Team Eight and Team Gai. He accepted.

Naruto learned a great deal about Team Eight and Team Gai when he practiced with them. Naruto never would have guessed that both Neji and Kiba were halfway decent genjutsu users until Kiba had him tied to a tree by the branches and Neji made him think his limbs had dissolved into water fifteen minutes later. He had no idea Shino actually had a taijutsu style; it worked devastatingly well when the kikai ran interference.

The blond got quite a knowing snicker on seeing Neji go absolutely _green_ every time Kiba and Tenten got down to talking, no matter what the topic of conversation was. And God help him when Tenten set a fireball after him…

All in all, with Lee challenging to a fight every other minute combined with Kurenai's patient guidance, Naruto's taijutsu and genjutsu skills slowly improved.

After about a month of that, a month in which Naruto saw more of Hinata than he ever had before and came to know her better than he had before, Lee, Neji, Kiba and Shino took him aside and gave him the male version of Kurenai, Ino and Tenten's speech. Naruto, thankfully, didn't need much encouragement.

Then, came the threats. For this Tenten, Hanabi and Kurenai became involved. They all said something different, but Naruto was no fool. He knew it all came back down to the same thing: ritual castration if he in any way attempted to end it without Hinata's express consent.

Hiashi didn't have the heart to come between them; he actually thought, knowing Naruto's paternity, that the Uzumaki was probably one of the better choices Hinata could have made.

The dating was frequently punctuated by espionage on the part of nearly half Konoha's military and three interlopers from the Sand village, and just about everyone Naruto and Hinata knew. An especially memorable incident was when the Konohamaru squad and Hanabi fell through the thatched roof of a restaurant the couple were eating at; to top it off, Hanabi was completely unapologetic and actually helped Hinata finish off her zenzai.

About after a year or so of casual dating, Naruto proposed out of the blue. Getting permission was…an adventure.

Neji was short, simple, and to the point: he tried to push Naruto off the south wall; Lee stopped him. After a short scuffle in which Naruto pulled some of Neji's own taijutsu moves on him, Neji agreed to let him marry Hinata, if she agreed and Naruto survived his interview with Hiashi. Lee wept manly tears of joy.

Naruto returned to the Hyuuga compound somewhat scraped, but otherwise unharmed, with the look of someone going to their own funeral; Hiashi was standing at the entrance waiting for him.

In the Hyuuga compound, Hiashi led Naruto into a small room and locked the door behind him. No one was sure what words were passed between him, though Neji, Lee and Hanabi certainly tried to find out; the walls had somehow been Byakugan-proofed. At just the moment that Lee became convinced that Hiashi had killed Naruto and was going to storm the door and confront him, the two came out.

Naruto was completely unscathed, and was smiling, though his face was slightly pale. Hiashi looked unusually cheerful, and had his hand comfortably resting on the younger man's shoulder.

Hinata, when asked, took one look at him and for the first time in her life grinned ear to ear; Naruto took that to mean yes.

The Aburame clan graciously extended the use of their grounds for the wedding; it was the only place big enough to fit all the people who were invited and all the people who had invited themselves.

Naruto and Hinata were married a month after the latter turned twenty, a week before Naruto was confirmed as Rokudaime Hokage.

**91**

After Kakashi started teaching Sasuke, he discovered that he had a question that, had the Yondaime Hokage lived, he would have been asking him, probably about every time Team Seven was called together to train, a question that he would have been willing to ask in full view of everyone who knew him and could have ribbed him about it later.

"_How the _hell_ did you put up with me for so long?"_

**92**

A little known fact about Nii Yugito is that she could actually slip into more than two tails in her transformations.

The Nibi is a nekomata, and like all nekomata if it lives long enough its tail will fork more than twice. The Nibi has lived long enough to acquire _seven_ tails, voluntarily stopped it at that point, and chose to remain two-tailed in the eyes of most of humanity for reasons it—_she_ has refused to disclose.

The Raikage never knew this; Kirabi did. Yugito accidentally slipped into a _four_-tailed transformation while on a mission with the fellow host; Kirabi elected not to tell the Raikage.

After that, Kirabi routinely started dragging Yugito off into the mountains to see how many tails she could stably manifest. The most Yugito could ever slip into without killing herself was six, and after that Kirabi had to carry her to the nearest service hospital in a nearby border town; she was burnt up so badly.

It was Yugito and Kirabi's secret; Kirabi, to his credit, never even thought of telling his brother.

After all…

Jinchūriki will always have their secrets.

**93**

Despite his difficulties with Sakura (or perhaps because of them), it was Lee who, out of the Konoha gang, had the best luck with women.

He was Tenten's favored friend, who considered him to be something of a brother. Not an older brother or a younger brother, just a brother and an ideal sparring partner, who never got tired and was never sulky when he lost or overbearing when he won.

He and Hinata dated for about a month. Well, it wasn't full out dating as much as it was friendly dating. They ate together and talked together, and when they stopped doing this suddenly Lee was apparently still enough in her good graces for Hinata to beg him to be her date to Kiba's house party a month later.

Lee and Ino didn't exactly date. He managed to charm Ino by taking the heavier packages delivered to the flower shop and carrying them to their proper places, no questions asked. Ino introduced Lee to the joys of flower arranging, and to this day if you were to ask him he would tell you that knowing that roses go with baby's breath is perfectly acceptable for a man. Kiba, Shikamaru and Kankuro all beg to differ.

He even dated Temari at one point. Gaara and Kankuro, for the life of them could not figure out what was going on, though Gaara, like Naruto and Ino, suspected that Temari was doing it to make Shikamaru jealous. Certainly didn't stop her from enjoying the short-lived relationship. And Naruto, who despite giving up on her still harbored feelings for the Sand kunoichi he just could not quite understand, was a bit jealous himself.

In fact, the only girl he probably wasn't considered a "special friend" of was Sakura, who was still chasing after the _big_ fish, though her target was by this time slightly altered.

When asked, as Konohamaru would later ask Udon after the latter out of the blue scored a date with Hanabi, "_How the hell did you do that_?", Lee and Udon both would nonchalantly answer, "_Honesty, courtesy and respect is always best."_

**94**

Shortly after Hiashi died, Hanabi and Hinata started to introduce changes into the workings of the Hyuuga clan.

The cursed seal had been around longer than anyone could remember, predating the founding of Konoha, used to ensure the loyalty of the Hyuuga Branch family; the existence of the seal was one of the worst-kept secrets in Konoha; practically every shinobi knew about it. Out of all the Hyuuga clan heads, Hyuuga Hiashi had without a doubt been the most sparing when it came to activating the seal, due in part to the fact that his twin brother had been put in the Branch House, but he had still had to activate it from time to time, and both Hinata and Hanabi had vivid memories of watching a kinsman or kinswoman writhing on the ground in agony.

So they, or more specifically, Hinata, took action.

There were better ways to gain and keep loyalty, better ways to keep the peace. The next generation deserved to wear the hitai-ate at their brow as a matter of choice and pride, not necessity and secret shame. Hinata knew Neji and Tenten would take their twins and run (even though only Tsukiyo had actually inherited the Byakugan; Akina had been born without it) if the suggestion that their daughters be branded was ever even hinted to them. And there was no way in hell Hinata was putting the curse seal on one of _her _children.

Hinata was officially clan head after her father died, though, as she had married a man outside of the clan and their children would not go by the name of Hyuuga, her eldest child could not inherit (And she was pregnant at the time, with twins; it was a common occurrence in the Hyuuga clan). So she went before the clan elders and laid down her proposition.

Her request, as it was, was simple. Since there was no way known to remove the seal from someone after they had been branded, Hinata wanted nothing less than permission to destroy the documents containing the jutsus needed to both apply and activate seal. Seeing as the council was mainly made up of Main Branch members who were thoroughly convinced of their own superiority, she was roundly denied. Some of them outright ignored her request altogether, still seeing Hinata as the weak heiress.

Determined to show them just how _weak_ she was, Hinata went on a different line of attack. She called in reinforcements. Namely, most of the Hyuuga Branch Family and her husband the Rokudaime Hokage. Naruto, Neji and three of Hinata's distant cousins went up to the elders and _politely_ requested that Hinata's request be approved. Of course, how polite it really was no one will ever really know; the doors to the chamber were barred, locked, bolted and Byakugan-proofed. It's only assumed that the conversation never became heated because raised voices couldn't be heard.

When the scrolls containing the jutsus needed to create and activate the Branch Family cursed seal were publicly burned in the Hyuuga compound, Hinata smiled, the body of the Hyuuga clan cheered insanely and went out in mass droves for drinking parties that night, Neji and Naruto looked highly pleased with themselves and the elders were absolutely mortified.

**95**

The Tsuchikage knew full well who the culprit was when the infant jinchūriki of the Yonbi no Saru disappeared. And he would have been fully prepared to march down to Suna if he hadn't been afraid that Suna's army would utterly smash Iwa's shinobi force.

Gaara, for himself, was completely unrepentant; he had given him fair warning, and the Tsuchikage should have known better. Gaara had never made a toothless threat in his life, and he wasn't about to start as a grown man.

Anyway, Tenjou Itsuyo, host of the Yonbi, was snatched away from her bed one night by a member of Suna's ANBU Black Op.s, and brought back to Gaara when it was deemed that she was suffering from the sadly normal prejudice inflicted upon jinchūriki.

Gaara never had any children (despite his on and off again relationship with Sakura, which only ended with her death a couple of years after they turned thirty); Itsuyo essentially became a daughter to him. And Itsuyo found herself with a large extended family: Kankuro, Temari, Naruto, Shikamaru, Sakura (though Itsuyo on more than one occasion either jokingly or seriously called her Kaasan) and Lee found themselves playing aunts and uncles to the girl; Neji and Tenten's children, along with Naruto and Hinata's and eventually Temari and Shikamaru's brood, were sort of cousins to the girl; and, rather unwillingly, Baki found himself referred to as ojiisan on one occasion. Much to his chagrin.

Gaara had loads of fun when Itsuyo started teething, and the most common thing she wanted to sink her sharp little teeth (a trait common to jinchūriki) into was the surface of his skin. The terrible two's were nipped in the bud quickly and methodically with an unprejudiced wall of sand. And the Sand Siblings had a really great time explaining why Daddy dropped off the face of the earth at the full moon, and why Kaasan was a pink-haired medic who was only around every once in a while. Temari started importuning Sakura to spend more time in Suna seeing as the latter's relationship with Gaara essentially made her Itsuyo's mother.

Itsuyo learned what she had inside of her when she was six; Gaara, who had had the experience of growing up a host, having the bijū ripped out of him and then willingly—_willingly_—having it put back inside of him to keep the village safe, felt that he was the only one who could tell her. She took it surprisingly well; she grew up with two jinchūriki, and the Sand Siblings, so she was more than used to strangeness and she at least had someone to talk to who understood _exactly_ what she was going through.

The reason Gaara told her was that she had just had her first bijū-related outburst, accidentally leveling a small building; no one was killed, though there were a few broken bones. Itsuyo had gotten a fist to the face while getting into a scuffle with two older boys, and she just got so angry…

Anyway, Gaara took her out into the desert for a few days to cool off, leaving Baki and Kankuro—Temari was still serving as ambassador to Konoha—in charge while he was gone. Out there, Itsuyo got the facts of life in earnest.

When they came back, Itsuyo had reasonably calmed down, and Gaara got down to training her.

He started off on the basics; chakra control, tree-walking (or in Suna's case, wall walking)…They even went out and found a river to practice water walking on. Naruto taught her the Kage Bunshin technique, since her huge chakra reserves made her perfect for that. Beyond that, it was Earth ninjutsu, a bit of taijutsu from Baki (who still kept trying to get Gaara to learn the same, despite the fact that his old student was by now a grown man in his twenties and outranked him), and, most importantly, she learned how to mould the abilities that came with her bijū. Itsuyo learned lava-based techniques.

From Sakura, Itsuyo learned different things. She learned, not about medical ninjutsu (the bijū's chakra made all attempts at pushing healing chakra into a body other than the host's one poisonous and possibly fatal), but about poisons and non-chakra first aid. She learned softer things too, things Temari herself had never been taught and thus could not impart. Itsuyo learned how a gentle hand could stay a mountain, about the brilliance of a spring sunrise and the beauty of a forest at midday, and after Sakura was gone from her life Itsuyo still liked to venture north to River country during summer and just sit in the forest, willing the wind in the trees to speak to her in her mother's voice.

Itsuyo grew, an undersized girl with golden brown hair and brown eyes, made a genin at nine, put on a team with two genin her own age, and a sensei who knew them well: Sand medical kunoichi Sari, who had grown up a great deal from her slightly giddy adolescence.

Itsuyo went to the Chunin exams in Konoha at eleven, and made quite an impression during the Third Exam. Whether that impression was good or not remained to be seen.

_Naruto grinned playfully at Gaara. "Yours?"_

_Gaara grimaced, the grimace born both of pride and embarrassment, as Itsuyo, instead of using ninjutsu or genjutsu on her opponent, settled for nailing him clean in the middle of the nose. "Mine."_

**96**

The origin of the three ultimate techniques of the Uchiha clan, the Amaterasu, Susanoo and Tsukuyomi, all had highly divergent origins.

Amaterasu was the oldest of the clan's jutsus, predating their more mundane fire techniques, predating the Uchiha's joining with other clans by centuries. It went back to the time when the Uchiha clan, then a mercenary group from the mountains in the west of Hi no Kuni, feared on the battlefield for their bloodline, first went on the payroll of the Fire daimyo. The Amaterasu was born from the older son of the clan head in the middle of a hopeless battle at the base of a waterfall. It was a spur of the moment technique, formed by a desperate mind. The young man summoned up every bit of chakra left in his failing body into his throat, screamed the name of the sun goddess and prayed for his enemies to _burn._ When he opened his eyes, his adversaries were covered in black flame, screaming in agony as they died. Coincidentally, this young man had recently had to kill a close friend—finish what two wakizashi had started. The Amaterasu became the thing of legend, half-believed to be nothing more than a myth, until centuries later when two Uchiha brothers named Madara and Izuna revived the technique to devastating effect.

Susanoo was developed by the younger brother of Amaterasu's creator. After the older brother rose to become head of the Uchiha, the younger brother and his followers rebelled, the younger believing the leadership of the Uchiha was his birthright. He killed the youngest brother of the family for betraying him to their older sibling, thus enraging the oldest brother. The Susanoo, unlike Amaterasu, was a well-thought-out technique, designed as a defense against Amaterasu, and it did prove semi-effective. But only to a point. The younger brother was killed, and Susanoo too dropped into legend, scorned for its association with rebellion, until another Uchiha named Sasuke drew it from the abyss.

It was around this time that the Uchiha began to realize that not every one of the clansmen could perform these techniques. After asking around, it was revealed that everyone who could perform the two techniques had at one time killed a close friend or kinsman and that the tomoes of their Sharingan had developed odd shapes after that. The mutation was dubbed the Mangekyo Sharingan and branded the sign of the kin slayer.

Coincidentally, use of the Mangekyo only started to make users go blind _after_ some Uchiha started to deliberately kill their kinsmen in order to gain it. After that, it struck indiscriminately, regardless of whether or not the killing had been intentional.

Tsukuyomi was developed after Konoha was founded, and was created by a woman, Uchiha Mikoto's grandmother, in fact. Uchiha Hatomi had recently performed a mercy killing in battle, and the battle itself had left her with a leg injury that prevented her from running as quickly as before. Hatomi was a genjutsu mistress, and sought a more powerful genjutsu to supplement her arsenal. Tsukuyomi was the result, and the effect it had on her reputation was startling. Most of the clan avoided her, all but her cousin Kagami, whom she later married. Surpassing her as a master of the art was her great grandson Itachi, who like her had plenty of reason to slip into illusion.

**97**

At the age of forty-four, after twenty-four years of holding the hat, Naruto handed the hat over to Konohamaru, retired, set his affairs in order, said his goodbyes and marched out of the village.

It wasn't that he had become disillusioned or cynical. There were reasons. Naruto felt that his children, the youngest and only child not to inherit their mother's Byakugan being eighteen-year-old Arashi, were old enough to take care of themselves. Hinata had just died; half of his friends were dead as well.

But that was not it.

Naruto had looked into the mirror one day and to his horror realized that while all of his friends, even Gaara (who thanks to the Shukaku didn't show his age nearly as much as other men in their forties would) were starting to go gray at the roots, he was a dead ringer for his eighteen-year-old son.

When he got out into the wilderness, near one of those mountains Jiraiya had loved so much (he felt a little closer to his old teacher when he was at the mountain), Naruto made camp somewhere private and started demanding answers from the Kyuubi.

The Kyuubi confirmed Naruto's worst fears.

'_**You're stuck with me, kit, until the stars fall out of the sky or you get a wound I can't heal.'**_

Naruto couldn't figure out why Orochimaru had been so obsessed with gaining immortality. Immortality, even conditional immortality, was miserable.

About a year later, Kakashi was dying in Konoha, having taken infection after taking a mission (Everyone had been trying to get him to retire for years, especially since the sight in his Sharingan eye had deteriorated enough for him to be considered legally blind in one eye). The second Uzumaki Arashi was checking up on him from time to time, and he received a strange report from one of his fellow ANBU. There was a man in a brown cloak, a fairly short man (according to the ANBU standing about sixty seven inches), who had literally stayed in Kakashi's room for a good eighteen hours. When Arashi stormed in, Kakashi was alone and telling him that he had no idea what Arashi was talking about.

At the funeral, the brown-cloaked man was there, and only Arashi even had an inkling who he was.

The process was repeated as each and every of Naruto's friends lay dying.

Around forty year after Naruto left Konoha, the shinobi decided to go ahead and carve his name onto the cenotaph; the way they figured, he was probably dead. Well, they were wrong. Naruto was just as spruce as ever, not looking a day over twenty-one.

**98**

When Sasori died, Deidara and Konan collected the body. When they found it, they found three things on Sasori's body: an _unscratched_ hitai-ate, a purple tassel, and a picture of Sasori at fifteen standing with a girl with shoulder-length dark blonde hair. Both were wearing flak jackets and smiling lightheartedly.

The tassel, Deidara knew, was a symbol of the Murasaki sect, one of the four Sunagakure sects of puppetry. But he had no idea why the hitai-ate was unscratched or what the picture was doing there.

Only Konan has any idea as to why Sasori left his hitai-ate unmarked. More importantly, she's one of the few left alive who knows who the girl in the picture is.

And she's not talking.

**99**

The parents of the Konoha 12 all have marked memories of Tsunade from their youth.

Aburame Shibi and the rest of the clan still talk about the day an injured Tsunade (her ankle was sprained) was put on a D-Rank mission inside the Aburame compound; a then eleven-year-old Shibi was assigned to accompany her. They were going about finding the rare tree the kikai liked to lay their eggs in, and harvesting those eggs to be implanted within the next host born. Tsunade and kikai do _not_ mix. They took an especial interest to the perfume Tsunade was wearing, and Tsunade (Shibi had earlier assured her that the kikai would leave her alone), understandably, freaked out when the kikai tried to nest in her open mouth. She started flailing around, trying to get away from the kikai, and in the chaos, the tree where the eggs were was destroyed. The Aburame, horrified by the massive loss of life, wrote a plaintive note to the Sandaime, requesting that Tsunade not to be given any more missions to the Aburame compound. Shortly after that, she was banned from the compound altogether. That day lives on in infamy.

Shibi, despite everything, likes Tsunade. However, it's all he can do not to burst out laughing every time he sees her.

Tsunade once led a trio of fourteen-year-old chunin into battle during the Second War, chunin by the name of Yamanaka, Nara and Akimichi. This trio was continuing a time-honored tradition of the three clans working together in battle, though they hadn't actually been on the same genin squad. They were going up against about a dozen Sand shinobi, led by the old veteran Akasuna no Chiyo. Choza for some reason seemed utterly horrified that two of the Sand company were children, a little blonde girl no older than eleven and a red-haired boy even younger, that is until the boy attacked Shikaku with a poison-dripping puppet and the girl drew a gigantic iron fan and bludgeoned Inoichi over the head with it.

Tsunade ended up going one on one with Chiyo; for a middle-aged woman, Chiyo moved fast, fast enough to dodge all of Tsunade's attacks. Tsunade eventually got nicked by one of the blades of Chiyo's puppet and passed out from the poison. When she woke up, splitting headache and all, the first thing she registered was that she was still alive to be waking up. The next thing she realized was that there were about nine Sand nin corpses around her, it was cold (the sun was setting on the desert), and that the trio had started a cook fire and Choza had something _good_ on the fire.

She learned the story. The moment she had fallen, Choza had swatted Chiyo away and Shikaku had run over. Using the medical knowledge he had gleaned from his clan, Shikaku had suctioned what poison he could out of Tsunade's body and then used a syringe to pump her body full of a general anti venom, seeing as many Sand poisons were created using venom from a scorpion's sting. Inoichi took care of the children by possessing the boy and forcing him to stab the girl in the gut, and Shikaku and Choza took out the rest. Chiyo had collected the children and run off, carrying the girl, the boy following close behind.

Inoichi at that point sarcastically asked Tsunade if she wanted an Akimichi food pill or one of the desert hares Shikaku had caught. Predictably, Tsunade chose the rabbit.

At thirteen, Tsunade volunteered to baby-sit the Hyuuga clan head's twin boys for the day for pocket money. Hiashi and Hizashi got a lesson in moulding chakra that day. Hizashi took to it right away; Hiashi…not so much. Their father, it seemed, had been giving them the same lessons, with similar results. Upon hearing this, Tsunade figured out a different way to teach them, teaching them to mould chakra with their Byakugan. Little did she know that her teachings would lead to the twins developing the Jyuuken style.

One day, Tsunade found herself setting the dislocated leg of a Leaf shinobi. Again. He was going on and on about how he just couldn't figure out why that move kept landing him in the hospital. A black-haired woman, his usual companion, was there with him again, looking worried. Tsunade finished up, discharged him, and flatly told him to put his weight on the _other_ side of his body next time. Despite her sympathy for the boy's pitiable state when she met him, Tsunade was highly amused to discover that Lee had inherited his father's bushy eyebrows.

The Inuzuka clan never could figure out what the Aburame had against Tsunade. Tsunade got on much better with the Inuzuka with the Aburame; it helped that she loved dogs so much. Tsunade was trying to get a grounding in veterinary practice, since the Inuzuka clan hounds featured so large on the battlefield. A teenaged Tsume was the one who put her through the standard anatomy of a canine. Tsunade was a big hit with the dogs. Maybe that was why Tsume wasn't quite as disapproving as she should have been when Hana announced her decision to become a medic.

Tsunade met ANBU medic Haruno Isao on a mission. And her reaction was about the same as any woman who had ever met him: to smile foolishly and stare when she thought he wasn't looking. Isao, a study in obliviousness, thought the older woman was either mental or going senile prematurely. Possibly both.

There was one woman who unfortunately showed up on a regular basis in the hospital's accidental injury ward. This woman, as she portrayed herself to Tsunade, was a klutz; she couldn't walk two feet without bumping in to something, without tripping, without falling over, and she was often bruised or scratched. When the woman came in with a tooth knocked out, Tsunade started to suspect otherwise. When the woman came in with a black eye, two broken ribs and a large mark on her upper arm in the shape a hand, Tsunade _knew_ otherwise.

After offering to beat the woman's bastard boyfriend/husband up, Tsunade offered two time-honored pieces of advice: A) Call the police, and B) Get out of the house. The woman never came back to the hospital; Tsunade didn't know if that was a good thing or not.

Tsunade nearly swallowed her tongue the first time she saw the woman's daughter covered in bruises after training; she finally knew why Tenten seemed so familiar.

Of all the people Tsunade left a poor impression of herself upon, with the possible exception of Chiyo of Sunagakure Uchiha Fugaku definitely had the lowest opinion of her. Now, this might have been explained away by just saying that Fugaku was an Uchiha and Tsunade was a Senju, but the actual answer was much more prosaic.

Fugaku had, on several occasions, been called in to arrest Tsunade. In fact it was so common that there were periods of time in which Tsunade was a very regular visitor to the police station on Friday nights. The usual charges ran from public drunkenness and drunk and disorderly behavior to disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and destruction of public property. There was always a white-haired man looking on laughing and for a period of about four years there was also a blue-haired man begging Tsunade to just go with him (That man, Fugaku figured, was Tsunade's boyfriend and he could well guess who wore the pants in _that_ relationship). Tsunade may have been a legendary kunoichi, but in Fugaku's eyes, she was nothing but a drunk with a huge sense of self-entitlement.

Tsunade somehow always avoided having to be taken to court, either by the use of the Sandaime using his authority or by (or so Fugaku suspected) heavy bribery in the right places. Either way, Tsunade always managed to avoid trial.

As for Mikoto… Mikoto was always the one taking Alka-Seltzer down to Tsunade in holding the morning after, rolling her eyes and curling her lip in disgust at the mega-hangover.

The only people who had more vivid memories of encounters with Tsunade than Fugaku and Mikoto were Minato and Kushina, and in stark contrast their memories were positive as opposed to negative.

Since Minato and Kushina were essentially raised by Jiraiya, they came into contact with Tsunade a great deal as children. Tsunade helped impart some of her strong will on Kushina, though God knew Kushina wasn't half the crazy bitch Tsunade had been capable of being. Tsunade also managed to keep Jiraiya's pervertedness from getting through Minato's pretty little head; she saw it as important to keep him pure.

Shortly before Naruto's birth, Minato managed to get a letter through to Tsunade. He told her about Kushina's pregnancy, that Jiraiya had agreed to be Naruto's godfather, and asked Tsunade to stand as godmother.

She refused. And she has never stopped regretting that.

**100**

It was at the Valley of the End, like Naruto always figured it would be, four years after their first encounter. They were alone; it had been raining off and on for days and the sunset sun was showing soft peachy orange through the clouds.

Sasuke gave no explanation, other then, "It's time to end things". For once in his life, Naruto agreed completely.

They had both come to the end of their tethers, both emotionally and mentally, to the point that they couldn't take the situation they were in any longer. They were both so thoroughly broken that talking didn't work anymore; Naruto and Sasuke didn't any words left for each other, so they just decided to use their fists.

Naruto wasn't really sure who Sasuke was anymore. He couldn't be sure if he was looking at the Avenger, the Would-Be Body of Orochimaru, the Lonely Genin, the Hurt Little Brother, or the Friend he had always wanted and for a time convinced himself he had. But he wanted to find out.

Sasuke, for himself, continued to make the mistake of underestimating the loud, blond runt in front of him.

During the fight, Sasuke once again put a Chidori, but this time, Naruto was ready for him. The moment Sasuke's fist went through Naruto's body, "Naruto" dispelled and the fight kicked up in earnest.

Sasuke finally devolved back down to taunts, well-placed and even more incisive than they had been four years ago. But amazingly, Naruto wasn't responding the way he had before. That was when Sasuke should have realized that things had changed. But he didn't.

What Naruto did next…

He didn't summon any toads, he didn't form the Rasengan, he didn't slip and hand over control to the Kyuubi, and he didn't even put his hands together and pull up a hundred damn clones like he always used to do. Instead, he reached into the pack tied to his leg, drew a kunai, and smiled.

It was a strange smile, one that made the hair on Sasuke's neck stand up. It was sad, resigned, deadened, and utterly _insane_, and Sasuke figured that Naruto had finally snapped, albeit in a quieter way than he had ever expected.

"You know, Sasuke. You're right. It is over."

And Naruto did the one thing Sasuke never expected him to do. He charged.

The kunai sank into his flesh, in the middle of his chest veering off a little to the left.

When Sasuke woke up, everything seemed a little different. The sky was soft, dull orange and pink again bordering storm clouds, but it was morning, not sunset. It had clearly been raining, because the ground was freshly soggy and Sasuke was soaked.

And Naruto was leaning over him so close that their noses were almost touching. Naruto's pale blond hair was plastered to his face. His eyes were bloodshot, the borders of his nostrils absolutely scarlet, his cheeks glittering. Two words came out of his mouth, only two words, hoarse and grieving and furious and so strangely _right._ "You…_bastard._"

Naruto couldn't tell if Sasuke had come back to him, truly, one last time. Sasuke had never made any sense to him. And he had no idea why Sasuke suddenly had a strange smile, as strange as the one Naruto had had on his own face the night before, on his mouth.

"_Tell the others?" Sasuke whispered, blood seeping around his lips._

_Naruto started, then nodded. "Sure." His voice cracked. "Sure."_

They wouldn't let Naruto carve Sasuke's name on the cenotaph. And due to the laws regarding missing nin, Naruto was afraid Sasuke's body might be mutilated. So he found a quiet place off to the side, and made a small grave. He covered the grave with rocks, went back to Konoha, and brought Sakura, Kakashi, Sai, everyone who had ever known Sasuke, to the place where he had buried him.

And there was not a word, either of regret or lack of, when they saw the pitiful pile of rocks and knew of _everything_ that had been buried within.

* * *

82: I don't know what it is with me and this strange urge to connect people familialy where there is no connection in canon.  
86: Don't kill me. If anything, that should underline _everything_ Gaara's willing to do for the village.  
92: The legend about nekomatas states that they _can_ form more than two tails.  
96: Kagami is not an OC. He appears in the flashback in chapter 481.  
97: The thing with the Kyuubi being able to heal just about any wound and Naruto never getting sick got me to wondering.  
98: There was probably a very detailed report about Sasori's fight with Chiyo and Sakura, and I don't think it's too far-fetched that Kankuro might have been able to construct a copy based on that information. He's skilled enough.  
100: That is exactly the way I think Sasuke's last stand _should_ go; I don't think he's going to go out—if he dies at all—with half as much dignity in the manga.

Okay, I'm probably going to continue this, but I'm not sure how I could top 100. I'll probably think of something though.


End file.
